Aaron Graham

Saint Louis, MO

Work Experience

Programmer Analyst

Washington University in St. Louis — St. Louis, MO — Dec 2011 – Present

I’m a front and back-end developer for public facing sites at WashU, primarily sites in the School of Medicine. I was hired to be on the team that explored and then implemented the move from Sharepoint to WordPress as the preferred CMS of the university. Our team developed a campus-wide suite of custom and off-the-shelf plugins paired with parent and child themes that adhered to brand standards that we use for both our on-prem hosted sites as well as our self-service option hosted by CampusPress.

Since early 2017 my primary role has been the development and maintenance of our most popular plugin that uses custom post types to add directory-like capabilities to our sites. This started out as a simple set of templates to display the post types but has become a full-fledged React app that uses the REST API to display interactive listings as well as search and filtering.

I also took the lead on developing Gutenberg blocks and was the developer lead for learning React. I also lead the effort to adopt React hooks as well as transition to Webpack and wp-scripts for our theme and plugin build processes. I’ve been affectionalty named the exploratory engineer by my manager as I tend to do research into emerging technologies and how we can use them to improve our processes.

Setup Configuration Analyst

AON — Remote (Michigan and Missouri) — Mar 2008 – Dec 2011

I was initially hired to set up and configure tables and parameters in the database on a *nix server using desktop tools. I quickly learned that the desktop tools were simply a GUI for command line programs and began writing (with approval) shell scripts and macros to help my fellow testers and the data entry people.

Shortly after I was hired the company was acquired by AON and the office was closed and I began working remote full time. The new company used an IBM mainframe with in-house created tools so I was unable to continue providing custom solutions to my co-workers. With the new system executed all phases of testing (unit, integration, acceptance and regression) for the sites as well as the desktop programs.

Education

Bachelor’s in Mathematics

Washington University in St. Louis — Dec 2015

Associate in Occupation and Technical Studies

Kalamazoo Valley Community College — Dec 2007

Volunteering

WordCamp St. Louis

Lead Organizer — 2015 & 2016

Organizer — 2014-2018

St. Louis WordPress Meetup

Co-organier of monthly meetups — Dec 2011 – Jan 2019

Kalamazoo Animal Rescue

Web developer — Kalamazoo, MI — Jan 2009 – June 2011

Oversaw a team of 6 volunteer and intern developers that created a custom PHP-based CMS. Provided 24/7 support for website as well as desktop support for volunteers. Provided presentations to Board of Directors on a monthly basis on site metrics.