Bio
Gunnar grew up in Juneau, AK. His parents owned a bike shop and he spent much of his childhood pedaling around. After studying physics at CMU, Gunnar took a detour to the Patent Office. After two years of reading patents, Gunnar made the leap to software development and never looked back.
Gunnar worked for NOAA National Marine Fisheries for nearly 10 years, writing software to manage fisheries. The tldr; is he helped count dead fish so we don't kill too many.
Gunnar currently works for Remitly helping to create software that makes Remitly the most trusted suite of financial services for immigrants. In particular, Gunnar writes a platform that connections customers with the best customer service representative to help them. This means Gunnar spends a lot of time elbows deep in Salesforce integrations, temporal.io workflows and every corner of the product code that may conceivably need human judgement.
Contact
You can contact Gunnar at his email, [email protected] or @monknomo on Twitter. Please feel free to get in touch, don't be shy.
Work Projects
Remitly
Gunnar's main project at Remitly is a platform for customer service requests. This allows internal and external systems to request that a customer service representative do something. This platform provides 'judgement as a service'. The platform also allows requests to be grouped together for case management and routing to the best available person.
Gunnar has also created Remitly's Salesforce integration.
Gunnar also created and maintains Remitly's customer service chat implementation, as well as the routing and prioritization framework for all incoming customer contacts.
Working in the customer esrvice domain allows Gunnar to work across nearly all of Remitly's systems and teams. This breadth of experience has been a vital engine for Gunnar's growth as a software developer.
NOAA NMFS AKR
Gunnar's main project at NOAA NMFS AKR was the eLandings Electronic Logbook, which
- Reduces paper storage requirements
- Enables searchability
- Eliminates the need for a scanning/ocr crew and the accompanying errors
- Decreases the data turnaround from the field to the office
The most interesting thing about the logbook is that boats in the Bering Sea use it. Many of the boats don't have internet, so we maintain an "http over email" service. Our email service accepts special messages, submits them to our webservices and returns the result to the sender. This technique connects remote locations on shoestring a budget of bytes and dollars.
Gunnar is also the lead developer of NMFS's internal permitting system. This is the system that our business users use to issue permits to fisherpeople. Our internal permitting system also helps with analysis, so we can tell how many fish remain in the ocean.
Gunnar's main contributions are:
- Automating build processes with Ant and Jenkins
- Automating testing
- Increasing test coverage
- Automating deploys
- Creating a quality control process
Work Passions
Gunnar gets worked up about automation. If a developer has to do the same thing three time, he automates it. Gunnar believes in helping everyone on his team do more
Resume
This page serves as a fairly up to date overview of Gunnar's professional activities, but for those inclined, Gunnar keeps his resume up to date at StackOverflow's public CV
Just For Fun
Gunnar has a neocities website where he puts his "just for fun" javascript projects.
Gunnar also has maintains a toy for drawing, inspired by kid pix, at draw.horse.