Mario Russo is a pragmatic problem solver and people-first leader with over 20 years experience growing ideas, teams, products and platforms. He has worked with startups as well as enterprise customers in fields such as federal government, defense, public health and wellness, finance, criminal justice, and most recently supporting scientific research.

Mario brings with him experience gained in many roles include day-to-day operations management, project management, information security leadership, infrastructure management, technical architecture, user experience design, software engineering, human resources, and work in the creative arts.

Executive Leadership, Technical Strategy, Team Development, Operations Management, Information Security

Testing and performance improvements for a leading health and wellness client

Enterprise web application design, development, and support

Artisan's Asylum is a non-profit community craft studio and manufacturing facility

The Ironworks is a design and fabrication studio specializing in traditional forged ornamental ironwork and sculpture

Focused on increasing the adoption of alternate fuels and transportation methods in the Atlanta area

Roundarch was founded by Deloitte Consulting specializing in user-centric web development

Senior Concentration: Design with microcontrollers and embedded systems

Three month sabbatical to formally explore design in an intensive studio environment

API v2 is designed and developed following a documentation-first methodology to support both the internal and external consumption and creation of research data.

To assist with the launch of a new SaaS product I conducted an audit of the existing site in order to evaluate the existing experience. Following a review of industry best-practices and competing technologies I created a cheat-sheet for implementing user on-boarding and enhancing user engagement.

As part of a performance tuning effort for an existing customer portal, I was engaged to review the production log data and codebase to take steps to improve page-load time. To ease in the harvesting of application data I created a Python log parsing script to extract and aggregate active data queries and running times. Slow running queries were then optimized where required, but the majority of the work was identifying the common queries and eliminating duplicates per page by implementing a caching layer.

In response to an increasing user base and planned expansion of personalized user communications, my client realized it would no longer be able to adequately support the user notification service in-house. I migrated the application from a custom JavaMail and SMS implementation to use cloud-based providers for Email and SMS, MailChimp's Mandrill and Twilio.

The goal of this project was to migrate a large wellness assessment survey onto a better performing and more scalable platform. The major risk factor was the faultless migration of complicated business and scoring logic. I designed and developed a comprehensive regression test suite to validate logic branching decisions, score calculations, and the resulting dynamic content which would be displayed to the end-user. I worked in conjunction with the development team to identify potential errors as the functionality was developed, so that when we received an initial test dataset of ~12,000 survey responses for validation, we were able to match all but 6 test cases, which were later found to be erroneous.

The United States Air Force portal is a platform for strengthening community and sharing information with remotely stationed personnel. Our team created an incremental plan to migrate the application away from the BroadVision One to One Enterprise platform to a custom portal based upon open-source frameworks like Spring and Hibernate. Our initial effort moved the application from the BV Interaction Managers to IBM WebSphere Application Servers which alleviated request queueing issues and drastically improved page load times. We then began a substantial content and data migration effort from the BroadVision schema of 100+ tables to ~15 on the new schema. Additionally, we redesigned the portal UI to break the visual ties from the BroadVision paradigm of 'Pages / Portlets / Blocks'. We also built an entire content publishing and management system to serve the unique organizational structure and processes within the Air Force. Over the course of the project we were able to decommision five physical servers, eliminate $1M in annual licensing costs, and see application performance gains on the order of 350+%.