Daniel Foerster
Summary
World-class Python developer with over a decade of serious development experience. Organically and intentionally growing leader, mentor, and educator. Proven versatility through work in a wide range of environments including full-stack web development, ETL pipelines, cloud/serverless computing, and SQL-backed systems. Veteran of a variety of SDLC methodologies such as Object-Oriented Programming, Dependency Injection, Continuous Integration, Kanban, and Agile/Scrum.
Experience
Lead Developer
August 2022 – Present
D48.io
Creative, technical, and educational lead for open-source and contract projects
- Developed Anchovy, a versatile static site generator written in Python
- Produced limited Python bindings for lightningcss, a Rust CSS transformation/minification library
- Created d48.io, a professional website using Anchovy
- Created classycoopswi.com, a professional/trades website using Anchovy
- Designed a GitHub build pipeline for Python bindings for tdewolff-minify, a Go web asset minification library
Programming Tutor
June 2022 – Present
Varsity Tutors
Contract tutor for long-term and emergency students
- Selected curriculum for elementary and collegiate Python students
- Offered real-time interventions for students with comprehension emergencies
- Maintained exciting and meaningful progression for long-term student across 30+ lessons
Teaching Intern
May 2023 – July 2023
Falls Baptist Church
Co-teacher for pilot of new summer school track
- Helped pilot the Shining Stars Teen Apprenticeship Program for middle school and high school boys.
- Taught history, reading, and writing components, including selecting texts and creating classroom materials.
- Helped supervise hands-on and music components.
Open Source/Freelance Developer
March 2012 – July 2022
Self-driven contributor to both personal and team projects in a variety of languages and applications
- Developed a library to facilitate single-codebase support of both Python 2 and 3
- Developed a lightweight library for event, state, and resource management for Pygame
- Developed a low-latency network scalable task-distribution library
- Designed or rebuilt several websites with HTML 5 and CSS 3
- Built a simple library for translating BBCode into HTML
- Constructed and deployed the official Python bot for a small MMO using raw network bytestream analysis and the C++ client source
- Designed a top-down arcade game in Python/Pygame
- Earned “Top Developer” award in Upwork.com’s Spring 2015 Coding Challenge
- Built a responsive, accessibility-enabled template for the ICEI website using Nikola
- Spearheaded adoption of Creative Commons licensing for Battle for Wesnoth assets
Senior IT Developer
March 2021 – December 2021
Athene USA — West Des Moines, IA
Key subject matter expert in Python for Actuarial-IT team
- Built versatile ETL libraries and tools
- Provided code review for development work across team
- Led development for internal systems sub-team both by working tickets and by clearing blockers
- Served on organization-wide Python Working Group
- Assembled a Python build toolkit involving environment provision, versioning, and a custom pylint extension with a NLP component for detecting commented-out code
IT Developer
May 2017 – March 2021
Athene USA — West Des Moines, IA
Primary individual contributor to mission-critical greenfield projects
- Developed Python + PostgreSQL/SQLAlchemy ETL solution for new area of business
- Developed complete suite of ETL processes as part of small team
- Designed and iterated core libraries to handle new problem spaces
- Built Python/PostgreSQL development guidelines and standards
- Targeted development lifecycle improvements through tooling and code review integration
- Drove migration from Python 3.4 to 3.6 and evangelized for feature adoption
- Served as temporary scrum master for small Agile team
Backend Developer
August 2015 – April 2017
DuPont Pioneer — Johnston, IA
Individual contributor on Scrum team building AWS-based Python RESTful API from infancy to release
- Improved scripting of CI pipeline
- Managed tagging, approving, and verifying biweekly production deployments
- Performed Python code reviews for five separate product teams
Lead Developer
May 2015 – February 2016
Land of Fire (Open source)
Core developer and leader for entire team
- Led effort to revive project after loss of lead developer/admin
- Managed hosting for game server and website
- Coordinated development and releases
- Designed and built new project website
Programming Intern
May 2014 – August 2014
Oakland Corporation – Story City, IA
Individual contributor with technology selection responsibilities
- Constructed a threaded web crawler in Python with Beautiful Soup 4, using regular expressions and heuristics to identify useful information even on malformed pages
- Designed a responsive modular web dashboard with AngularJS and nvd3.js
Backend Developer
September 2012 – December 2012
Omime.com (Defunct)
Primary contributor to backend development
- Deployed testing environments, including on Ubuntu Server over SSH
- Implemented a JSON-over-HTTP server with CherryPy
- Built backend for XMPP interfacing
- Developed a lightweight SQLite ORM toolkit
Education
Bachelor of Arts: Bible, Music Pedagogy
January 2022 – May 2025
Baptist College of Ministry – Menomonee Falls, WI
One-Year Certificate: Bible
August 2013 – May 2014
Ambassador Baptist College – Lattimore, NC