Brent led a large Oracle database migration to PostgreSQL and Azure, persevering through to project completion and successfully bringing four environments into production across two cloud regions. He established the initial timeline, budget, and resources for the project and consistently guided the team to adhere to them. Engaging Microsoft under a consulting contract ensured regular team communication to build and validate the correct solution architecture and resolve issues with PostgreSQL on Azure. His engineering mindset fostered a strong understanding of project requirements and enabled him to effectively communicate with the platform team, driving the project forward. Brent collaborated with the platform team to identify dependencies between building environments, migrating data, and converting Java code. I would highly recommend Brent as a team member for your next technical project!
Brent successfully transitioned from the role of developer to product manager, with roadmap responsibility for one of CNN’s most distinct and popular international properties: CNN Travel. He proved to be an ideal fit for the role — not only technically savvy, but driven to make the product a powerful destination for consumers and advertisers.
I worked with Brent on CNN Travel project for almost 3 years. He is one of those rare people that have a healthy balance of technical and people skills. He is the epitome of a true leader/manager: he leads by example, helps you if you’re stuck, respects and considers your suggestions, shows his appreciation for your work and gratitude to your extra effort, and gives insightful feedback and positive criticisms. He always seems to have lots of creative ideas on how to improve our site and/or leverage new technologies or APIs. Likewise, he developed further my creative side on thinking outside of the box, especially for investigating/fixing hard bugs. I’ve learned also from him on how to prioritize tasks and implement them effectively and efficiently. He is very supportive also of open-source projects. He encourages his developers to contribute back to community and share what we have learned. I have a number of successful open-source projects because of him. Essentially, he made me a better person and developer. I will highly recommend Brent for any development team because he is an exceptional person. He has high expectations on his developers, but even if he’s your boss, you will feel that he values your work and he is your friend. A number of times, I’ve heard him say that he wants his developers to be smarter than him (I bet only few managers could openly say that) which only further illustrates his selflessness, humility, and team-playing skills.
I had the pleasure of working with Brent on CNN Travel Drupal website project. I was particularly impressed by his ability to handle our team because of his strong and broad technical and project expertise. He was able to help us to provide solutions, keep us always focused and motivated. He always ensures that we are working on the right tasks, and our work will be completed in the expected time frame. I am grateful for his professionalism, hard work, loyalty and friendship. Brent is not only an exceptional manager, he is also a great Agile coach.
Brent joined my team at an early stage in the development of CNNGo, spearheading the technical production aspects of the product, and directly managing the engineering team. Brent was able to quickly take the lead in the planning and execution of our product development, which included upgrading and migrating the product to a considerably more robust and scalable state, and using his extensive Drupal experience to its fullest. Brent has a detail-oriented and logical approach to his work, meaning that you can count on him to capture and prioritize tasks, plan systematically, and manage the delivery of customer value consistently. He has a strong knowledge of the SDLC and web development methodologies, as well as the important human factor required to get the best out of diverse and distributed teams. He makes a great lead for any kind of digital production team.
Brent is one of the best technical managers I have ever worked with and his knowledge of Drupal is second to none. He was instrumental in implementing the SCRUM agile process at CNNGo / CNN Travel and in making continuous performance improvements to the stability and responsiveness of the site. I appreciated his keen sense of being able to prioritise and execute large backlogs of work with highly constrained resources. I wouldn’t hesitate recommending him for both large and small projects.