Brendan Hill

Experience

1. Principal Software Architect · Dimensional Solutions, Inc.

   Jun 2014 – present

   Katy, TX

   Twelve years guiding a civil-engineering product through one platform migration, the years of feature work that followed, and now its next architectural evolution.

   • Currently piloting the next architectural evolution: a three-tier server architecture that decouples the calc engine from the UI — enabling reuse across multiple front ends, cloud deployment, and the kind of unit-test coverage a UI-coupled codebase makes hard.
   • Currently leading the team’s adoption of agentic developer tooling (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, OpenClaw) — defining how it threads into code review and security review, and where to draw the line, so a small team can move faster without losing rigor.
   • Lead the product engineering team — four developers as direct reports and a QA function (lead plus two engineers) in Katy, plus an offshore support / QA hybrid group.
   • Architect and implement full-stack features for code-compliant foundation design, load back-calculation, and project material tracking — software used in production by civil engineers designing real structures.
   • Established the agile process, code-review standards, Azure DevOps pipelines, and onboarding practice. Release cadence went from once a year to three times a year.
   • Led the multi-year migration of three commercial products from legacy Microsoft stacks to C# / .NET / WPF (completed 2018). Set the technology roadmap and architectural patterns the team builds against today.
   • Originally joined DSI as a developer in 1998–2000 (VB6 era) — wrote the civil-engineering and CAD-automation libraries the company still depends on. Returned in 2014 to lead the modernization of those products onto .NET.

   Stack: C#, .NET, WPF, MVVM, Prism, Azure DevOps, SQL Server, Excel interop.

2. Sr. Software Engineer · Cardno PPI

   Nov 2008 – Jun 2014

   Lead UI design and implementation on a SaaS oil-and-gas quality-management product.

   • Led UI design and implementation for a cloud-based SaaS quality-management product serving oil-and-gas operations.
   • Shipped a dashboard + KPI system reporting on equipment failure rates by region, vendor, and time window.
   • Built the reusable custom UI controls the product depended on: a heterogeneous-data grid driven by LINQ-to-SQL expressions through AJAX, full-featured combo boxes designed around minimizing data transfer, and a guided wizard for complex equipment-inspection entry.
   • Designed a workflow system that captured customer-specific document processes against a single shared schema.
   • Improved page performance and bandwidth use by introducing view-model objects and targeted client-side caching on the controls and pages that needed it.
   • Coached junior engineers on DRY patterns and code-review practice.

   Stack: C#, .NET, ASP.NET WebForms, IIS, SQL Server, Telerik ASP.NET AJAX, Telerik ORM, jQuery, Knockout, SCSS / Compass, Foundation Grid.

3. Software Engineer · Brocade Communications, Inc.

   Mar 2006 – Oct 2008

   Owned the MyView client framework after Brocade's acquisition of NuView; it became the basis of a UI overhaul across the product line.

   • Following Brocade’s acquisition of NuView in 2006, continued building out MyView — its rich-client UI became the basis of a complete overhaul across Brocade’s product line.
   • Took sole ownership of the WinForms / C# client framework: feature work, maintenance, and code review on framework usage across product teams.
   • Drove developer education on the framework through brown-bags and recorded tutorials, helping other Brocade teams adopt it to cut UI code duplication.

   Stack: C#, .NET, Windows Forms, MFC interop, Sourcegear Vault, FogBugz, VMware, Microsoft DFS.

4. C# UI Developer · NuView, Inc.

   Nov 2004 – Mar 2006

   First C# / WinForms engineer on MyView — built the rich-client UI and the framework behind it. (NuView acquired by Brocade in 2006.)

   • First in the company to use C# and Windows Forms — designed and built the rich-client UI for MyView, a data-virtualization and file-access reporting tool.
   • Co-designed a WinForms eventing / context-menu / command / selection-tracking framework on the MVC pattern to cut UI code duplication.
   • Wrote the custom controls the framework needed — a multi-threaded multi-selectable tree view, a virtual list view, wizard-page infrastructure, and an Outlook-style navigation control.
   • Ported the legacy MFC UI and its custom controls onto the new WinForms / C# architecture.

   Stack: C#, .NET, Windows Forms, MFC interop.

5. Development Project Lead · BindView Development

   Jan 2004 – Sep 2004

   Led the integration team for BindView's vulnerability-assessment and policy-compliance products.

   • Promoted to lead the integration of BindView’s vulnerability-assessment and policy-compliance products with Microsoft MOM and HP OpenView (C++, COM, Win32, SOAP).
   • Coordinated across product, QA, dev, and docs to hit aggressive milestones.
   • Led the small team responsible for BindView’s software deployment libraries.

   Stack: C++, MFC, COM / DCOM, Win32, SOAP, Rational ClearCase / ClearQuest, VMware.

6. Developer · BindView Development

   Apr 2000 – Jan 2004

   Built and hardened the deployment libraries for BindView's vulnerability-assessment and patch-deployment products.

   • Designed and shipped the automatic-update system that pulled Microsoft patches from the Internet for BindView’s patch-deployment product (C++, COM, DCOM, WinHTTP).
   • Rebuilt the remote-agent deployment system for the vulnerability-assessment product line, cutting deployment-related tech-support incidents by 50%.
   • Halved customer incident turn-around time by adding rigorous logging across the deployment code path.
   • Flew to customer sites to debug, fix, and personally close critical support incidents.

   Stack: C++, MFC, COM / DCOM, Win32, Rational ClearCase / ClearQuest, VMware.

Selected projects

Personal work, built and run outside the day job.

• Riftward

  active

  A browser-based 2D top-down pixel-art space game in the buy-to-play multiplayer sandbox category (Valheim / Factorio / V Rising shape). Authoritative Node.js server, WebSocket realtime, one seeded procgen galaxy per server. Currently in alpha playtest.

  Stack: TypeScript · Node 22 · Vite · Canvas 2D · WebSockets · zod · SQLite · Fly.io · Cloudflare Pages · Vitest · Biome · GitHub Actions

• Provenance Map

  active

  An interactive graph visualization mapping relationships between chefs, restaurants, winemakers, and wineries — type a name, see a force-directed graph of mentors, alumni, sister labels, similar styles. Click any node to recenter on that entity. Alpha, Houston-chef-scene seed dataset.

  Stack: TypeScript · Next.js 16 · React 19 · React Flow · Tailwind 4 · zod · Cloudflare Workers (OpenNext) · Cloudflare R2 · Anthropic API · Vitest · ESLint

• Texas Electricity Plan Picker

  active

  Ranks Texas retail electricity plans by projected annual cost using your actual smart-meter usage, not the generic 500 / 1000 / 2000 kWh benchmarks PowerToChoose advertises. Pulls plan listings and per-REP Electricity Facts Labels, applies each plan's pricing structure to your real consumption. Engine and UI in progress.

  Stack: Python 3.12 · uv · FastAPI · Jinja2 · HTMX · SQLModel · Alembic · Postgres 17 · Cloudflare R2 · pdfplumber · uPlot · Docker on Synology · Cloudflare Tunnel · pytest · ruff · pyright · GitHub Actions

• Softball Lineup Sim

  active

  Monte Carlo lineup simulator for 8U coach-pitch softball — feed it season and two-game batting stats, get a ranking of lineup orders by expected runs over N simulated games. Pseudo-AB shrinkage toward team mean so a 4-for-6 weekend doesn't dominate the projection.

  Stack: Python · stdlib only · Monte Carlo · argparse CLI

• Cruise Price Tracker

  active

  Nightly tracker for Royal Caribbean and Celebrity casino-club offers and sailing prices. Reads the cruise lines' own JSON and GraphQL endpoints rather than scraping the DOM, keeps every observation in Postgres, and emails each user one digest per run when a watched sailing moves. Invite-gated alpha.

  Stack: Node 22 · Express · Postgres 17 · Playwright · Resend · Docker Compose on Synology · Cloudflare Tunnel · node --test

• Price Watch

  active

  Scheduled price collector for things I want to buy, flights included. Tiered fetchers step up from plain HTTP to a headed Chromium session for retailers that refuse headless browsers, every reading lands in Postgres, and an alert fires when a rule becomes true. Deploys itself from main every five minutes.

  Stack: Node 24 · Postgres 17 · Playwright · Xvfb · Cloudflare Access · Resend · ntfy · Docker Compose on Synology · node --test

Education

• B.S. Computer Science, Mathematics Minor · University of Houston

  Houston, TX