Axel Ancona Esselmann
San Francisco, CA • Axel@AnconaEsselmann.com • LinkedIn • www.anconaesselmann.com
EDUCATION
- Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (May 2016)
with a minor in Mathematics from San Francisco State University, California.
WORK HISTORY
Head of Engineering at Sugarmama Health (02/2020 - 04/2021)
Owned and architect all features currently found in the Glucose Goddess iOS app.
Decoded the proprietary NFC communication between Abbot’s glucose monitoring app and the Abbott Freestyle Libre CGM device.
Created native architecture that allows non-technical product owners to push content updates without requiring a release to the app store.
Built micro services to support the iOS app and a coach dash
Glucose Goddess in the app store
Lecturer in Computer Science at SFSU (8/2018 - current)
Proposed, developed and teaches hybrid undergraduate/graduate level class on software engineering for the iPhone — the only iOS course in any San Francisco college.
Inspired many of my approximately 400 students to seek careers as iOS engineers, with several students having released apps to the app store.
Senior Software Engineer at Vida Health (08/2016 - 02/2020)
Owned and helped architect a majority of the features currently found in the Vida iOS app — Goal setting, action recommendations, coach selection, health program selection, many of the programs themselves, a re-write of chat, snowplow tracking, a feature flag framework and integrations with smart asthma inhalers, blood pressure sensors and scales.
Lead the effort to decouple legacy features written in Objective-C and laid the foundation for breaking the app into a core framework supporting several feature frameworks, which resulted in significantly reduced build times when developing and a measurable increase in feature development speed.
Implemented automatic daily deployments from master, which, together with a feature-flag framework, moved the team from semi-monthly to weekly releases.
Lead a team of iOS and Android engineers as scrum master.
Mentored junior engineers and interns and managed contractors
Brought in talent, interviewed candidates and helped make hiring decisions.
Vida in the app store
Youth Wilderness Trip Leader and Educator at Camp Stevens (2006 - 2015)
Planned and led 6-10 day rock-climbing, sea-kayaking and backpacking trips for youth aged 11 through 18 to the Sierra Nevada mountains and Catalina Island.
Facilitated building of high-functioning groups of adults and teenagers through high-ropes-course and team-building challenges and developed original team-building activities.
Taught conflict-resolution skills to groups of counselors aged 16 through 19, taught how to give kind and constructive feedback, and taught how to lead groups of children for week-long summer camp sessions.
Taught and led week-long outdoor education sessions for sixth-graders and developed original activities.
View Extended Work History for Camp Stevens
Founder of Talus and Scree LLC (2011 - current)
Full Stack IOS Engineer (2014 - current)
Creator of GPX File Editor, an editor for track created with GPS devices. GPX File Editor was built with SwiftUI and Combine.
Creator of Color Wheel, a puzzle game. Color Wheel was built with SwiftUI and Combine.
Creator of Pi Home, a home automation tool for the iPhone. Pi Home allows users to remotely operate buzzer doors and garage doors that are not connected to the internet by interfacing with a Raspberry Pi. Family members can be invited to join a home through an email or text message. Pi Home was build with UIKit and RxSwift. The backend for the Raspberry Pi is open source.
Full Stack Web Developer (2011 - 2016)
Designed and developed a Content Management System (CMS) supporting account creation with email verification, activity-based access control and a templating engine tailored for internationalization. (view demo)
Designed and built responsive, mobile-friendly user interfaces with reusable, dependency-free JavaSript UI elements utilizing AJAX and a RESTful back-end. (view demo)
Designed and implemented databases for multiple web and IOS applications.
Deployed and administered custom CMS for multiple web and IOS applications on Linux servers.
Set up continuous integration with Jenkins and reached high levels of code coverage through writing unit tests (PHPUnit, PyUnit) and integration tests (Codeception and Selenium).
Creator of Open Source Tools (2013 - current)
Created and maintains over 20 cocoapod libraries that range in functionality from facilitating working with loadable results with RxSwift, creating programmatic views for iOS and WatchOS, parsing and processing GPS data and many others.
Created a Sublime Text plugin for running live unit-tests when programming. Mentioning non- existing files, classes and functions creates assets based on function signatures used in test cases. (view demo)
Created the iOS app Pi-Home that facilitates home access through the app. Created hardware that interfaces with the app to open garage doors and activate door buzzers that are not internet connected.
SKILLS
Programming Languages
Expert in: Swift
Proficient with: Objective C, Python (see LiveUnit), PHP (see Composition), and object oriented JavaScript (see Cages), C++ (see board game), C (see shell), Java (see interpreter project), MySQL (see user authentication), Regular Expressions (see MyMark), CSS and HTML (see Traces)
Unix, Server and Database Administration
LAMP (virtual hosts, ssl, mod_rewrite, mysqldump), git, subversion, ssh, Jenkins
Languages
Bilingual (English and German)
Dual citizenship (US and German).
Lived, studied, and worked in both countries for more than ten years.
View other Skills and Interests
ONLINE PRESENCE
GitHub, StackOverflow, LinkedIn, Flickr
For extended resume with links to applications and video demos visit www.anconaesselmann.com