Hello, I am Roberto Montero, a Software Engineer with over 10 years of experiance in web development. For the last three years I have focused on Drupal development. My weapon of choice is PHP and Drupal. I am fully bilingual ( English / Spanish ) and bi-cultural. I interact well with people regardless of their nation or creed.

My current emphasis is growing the Drupal community in Costa Rica. There's great potential talent just waiting to be taken to new heights. http://drupalcr.org will provide training material and support to help striving individuals achieve their goals. http://DrupalLatinAmerica.com will then capture freelance work that this individual can carry out thus making the Drupal community continue to grow.

I have always loved working for small companies and effective teams. I thrive on quick paced development and that's part of what I bring to the table.

I'm also still working on my chinese ( ni hao! ), but that's going to take a while.

Personal Information:

Roberto Montero Ortiz
Nationality: Costa Rican.
Visa: H1B + B1/B2

Work Experience:

2008 - Drupal Costa Rica + DLA Latin America. San Pedro, Costa Rica
Drupal Evangelist + Entrepreneur.

• Focus on Business Performance:
  • Specialized in high end, enterprise level Drupal websites.
  • Specialized in large scale ERP and CRM integrations like Eloqua and SalesForce.
  • Be the technical subject matter expert that assisted the sales team, providing an accurate and quick turnaround of RFPs, increasing the overall sales and exceeding the sales/marketing goals.
  • As an interim Project Manager I was able to facilitate communication between three different teams, coordinating the development, quality assurance, bug tracking and deployment cycles.
  • Technologies used: jQuery, AHAH, AJAX, CDN, CSS 3.0 and HTML 5.
  • Research and Development: In order to stay ahead of the curve, we researched all the bleeding edge emerging technologies, like Apache’s SOLR, Cassandra, MongoDB, Django (Python), Amazon EC2 instances, RightScale and MariaDB.
• Focus on Community Growth:
  • Strong involvement in the local PHP and Drupal communities.
  • Lead and support meet ups and workshops. We successfully created the Drupal Users Group and regularly host a meet up event called Drupal After Dark. Planning the first Drupal Camp Costa Rica.
  • We facilitate the training of young PHP developers into strong Drupal engineers.
  • We secure offshore projects and use them as training cases for our mentoring programs.
  • Increase project profitability by streamlining the development process and balancing the workload between developers of diverse levels.
  • We specialize in localization, internationalization and integration of social APIs and plugins.

2008 - 2009 ExcelSoftsources. San Pedro, Costa Rica
Team Lead & Senior Programmer II.

• Receive a Backlog of Use Cases and high level Stories, then lead and participate in sprint planning meetings, going over detailed tasks, and setting deliverables and delegating them balanced among the team.
• Strengths: Drupal module development, profiling and optimization. Drupal theming.
• Integration with third-party APIs like ComissionJunction.com and Amazon.com
• Build high-demand websites with minimal memory footprint.
• Build jQuery enriched backend user interfaces to deliver a friendly user experience.Coordinate tasks between the client and the development team.

2007-2008 Open Source Consulting. Paseo Colón, Costa Rica
Senior Developer & Team Lead.

• Coordinate four development teams spanning three countries to seamlessly deliver precise and quality solutions on time. Soft skills and lateral skills were key to managing a frictionless relationship.
• We had ownership of a complete product branch, thus enhancing it in every aspect including architecture, infrastructure, performance, accessibility and reliability.
• Refactoring and optimizing preexisting code.
• Use of refraction and introspection properties of PHP 5 in profiling classes to optimize the code.
   

2004-2007 PHP Beast.net San Pedro, Costa Rica
Senior Developer & Team Lead.

• Coordinate the Development Team. We built an SEO oriented CMS solution from scratch, using O.O. PHP Programming (classes and objects), AJAX, CSS, XML/XLS, RSS, Ping, Track-back and web services.
• We had to work with and optimize large data volume queries. We relied heavily on caching and memory tables to speed up the process of bulk website generation. Sites went from being rebuilt in 10 minutes to under 1 minute, increasing the amount of websites served per instance. The cached HTML and PHP files was then uploaded via user defined upload channels that could be FTP, SFTP, SCP or rsync.
  Coordinate Development Team.

2003-2004 OO.RR.S.A. Sabana Norte, Costa Rica
Senior Developer.

• Support high traffic websites. Participate in the programming and design of high demand websites and supporting mini sites for SEO marketing. Set up and manage the multiple domains and web properties.
• Develop our internal systems: Support, Task Management, Financial Reporting and Admin Backend.
• ASP to PHP migration and development of automation tools and scripts.
   

2001-2003 TecnoMercadeo Latinoamericano B° Luján, Costa Rica
Web Developer.

• Programming and Development.
• Network Administrator.
• Content Management Tools Development.
• Data Base Management.
• Server Management and Tech. Support.
• Installation and configuration of servers.
• Domain management, DNS, IPs
   

1999-2001 ULACIT. B° Tournón, Costa Rica.
Latinamerican University of Science and Technology
http://www.ulacit.ac.cr
Computer Lab Asst.

• Tech Support with end users.
• PC maintenance.
• Network setup and maintenance.
• Linux, Windows, MacOS, Solaris set up and maintenance.
• Systems Development Area.
• Graphical design of the school’s new internal systems.
• Other Activities.
• Trainer: Open courses ( MS Office suite).
• Workshops: ASP and internet develompent.
• Tutoring.
   

1998-2001 Cristo.Net B° Aranjuez, Costa Rica.
Junior Web Developer

• Light website creation. Efficient mini sites for costarrican Christian ministries.
• Full site development for events. Booking, accommodations management system, donations.
• Mentor junior coders. Assist PM with technical insight.
   

Education:
 

1999–2004 ULACIT B°Luján, Costa Rica.
BsCS in Computer Sciences.
Emphasis on Systems Engineering and Information Technologies.

1994–1998 CONBI College. (Conservatorio Bilingüe) Montes de Oca.
HighSchool.

1994 AAHS (Anglo American High School) Sn.Pedro.
Seventh Grade.

1989-1993 Saint Joseph’s Primary School. Moravia.
Elementary.

Areas of expertise:
 

CMS: Drupal ( 2+years ) WordPress ( 1+year)
Web: PHP ( 10 years ), AJAX, MySQL, REST, SOAP, XML, jQuery.
IDEs: Zend Studio. PDT, PHP Eclipse.
Frameworks: Zend Platform ( basic)
OS: LINUX – Windows Environments. Basic MacOS.
Version Control: CVS, SVN Versioning control systems.

Other not so used skills:
Certified PL/SQL programmer from ORACLE University
ASP, SQL Server.
MS-DOS to Windows XP.
Linux all major distros. Mostly Ubuntu and CentOS.
Adobe – Macromedia Suites.
Basic knowledge of Postgres, Flash, ActionScript, Flex, ColdFusion.

Work in Progress:
Getting my Zend Certification
Learning Mandarin.

Languages:
 

English: Reading – Writing – Comprehension 100%
Spanish: Native Speaker.

Brief Project Overview:
 

PHPBeast.com:

Webdesign, of the frontend (http://www.phpbeast.com/).
Team Lead and senior developer of the core system.
(http://brain.phpbeast.com/)

Freelance Developer:

• Expoempleo.net:
  Complete design and programming of the new HR system. ( Website )
• RedLogistic.com:
  Complete design and programming of a tailored CMR application. ( http://redlogistic.com/ )
• Horizontes Virtual Guide:
  Complete design and programming of a custom tourist information suite. ( http://www.horizontes.com/search/ )
• Guanacaste Rent-a-Car: Collaboration. ( Website offline )

Volunteer Work:

• Rotaractor ( 2006 - 2009 ) Club President.
  San Pedro Curridabat Rotaract Club Website:
  Coppermine + WordPress integration (http://spcurri.org/)
  Custom volunteer control system for a Telethon.
  SPCurri.org was decomissioned in 2009 and was ported over to http://sanpedrocurri.org going from WP to Drupal.
• Costa Rica Rotaract Clubs - http://www.rotaractcr.org
  Integrated Google Apps and Drupal for this websites.
• San Pedro Curridabat Rotary Club - http://rotarysanpedrocurridabat.org
  Integrated Google Apps, Drupal and Twitter for this website. Theme was custom tailored.