Jesse G. Donat

Senior Software Engineer with 15+ years building scalable, high-traffic systems in Go, JS/TS, and PHP. Experienced in database optimization, CI/CD, and cloud infrastructure. Seeking to bring this expertise to a high-impact team.

Experience

• Works with a team of developers in an agile, pull-request-driven workflow. Previously managed a team in a similar environment.
• Kept a multi-hundred-thousand-DAU system stable and performant under peak load.
• Built and maintain Slack-based deployment pipeline driven by GitHub WebHooks.
• Designed and built a Go-based message queue with instant crash recovery sustaining 100k+ requests per second.
• Built multiple high-throughput, low-latency data pipelines.

Technical Skills

• Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, PHP, HTML5, Modern CSS & Preprocessors
• MySQL/Aurora, Redis, Memcache, Gearman, AWS (EC2/S3/SQS/RDS/ElastiCache/Lambda/CloudFront/etc)
• Database query analysis and optimization for high traffic
• Deep experience with AWS, plus work on Google Cloud and Fly.io
• Docker based development, continuous integration and deployment
• Unit testing (Go / Jasmine / Mocha / PHPUnit)
• Code sniff development / building lexers and parsers for code verification
• Code review / pull request based workflow
• Version Control - Very well versed with git, some Mercurial
• Electron applications
• nginx / Apache
• Linux command line

Community

• Active contributor to many open source projects.
• Engaged participant in local developer meetups, including the Minnesota Go and PHP User Group. Helped kickstart the revival of the Minneapolis PHP User Group in 2024.

Speaking

"Beautiful PHP CLI Scripts", MidwestPHP Conference. St. Paul, MN, March 2013

My slide deck has been used with permission in multiple other presentations on the topic around the world.

• Slides: slideshare.net/donatJ1/beautiful-phpcli-scripts

Personal Projects

A large selection of personal projects can be found at github.com/donatj.

Force-Color.org

Defined the FORCE_COLOR environment variable standard used across multiple ecosystems. Forces command line tools to generate colored-output. Officially adopted by the Python, Deno and Julia languages runtimes, and NVIDIA Legate tooling.

• force-color.org

Shielded.dev

A web application for generating dynamic README shields. Written in Go, it generates SVG images for use in README files on GitHub and other services. It is a fully open REST API with a public SDK.

• Shielded.dev

SQLRead

MySQL dump parser, allowing querying data without loading into MySQL for quicker simple processing. Implements a simple SQL parser, both for parsing dumps as well as for the interactive frontend. Implements concurrent multithreaded parsing and lexing.

• github.com/donatj/sqlread

Employment History

Renaissance Learning – Bloomington, MN 2018 - Present

Senior Software Engineer

Senior contributor on high-traffic systems (100k+ DAU). Improved query performance, stability, and deployment speed across multiple services. Work across the entire stack. Drive improvements from architecture to deployment. Reduced load on core services with targeted query rewrites and caching changes.

myON – Bloomington, MN 2017 - March 2018

Senior Data Integration Developer

Focused on making data stores and reporting systems scalable and accessible. Worked daily with S3, Aurora (MySQL), Go, Redis, PHP, and TypeScript. The company was later acquired by Renaissance Learning.

Capstone Digital – Bloomington / Edina, MN 2011 - 2017

Senior Application Programmer 2013 – 2017
Application Programmer Sept 2011 – 2013

Focused primarily on backend development for an online student reading application, along with several other education-focused products.

Ecreativeworks – Plymouth, MN 2006 - 2011

Lead Developer 2010 – Sept 2011
Senior Developer 2008 – 2010
Developer Dec 2006 – 2008

Developed many client projects, and grew from entry-level to lead developer.
Designed and maintained our E-Commerce and CMS platforms used by a broad client base. Oversaw our development team, workflow and collaborated with leadership.

Education

Brown College – Brooklyn Center, MN 2004 - 2006

Associates of Science Software Development