I lead fellow engineers, folks at local quality meetups and I present at national conferences.
In the last three years my skill set has shifted. As a passionate developer I've reached a point where my greatest reward is teaching and inspiring those around me as well as working with other engineers at all levels to solve fun challenging problems
I am a constant learner and in 2019 the focus has been more on books such as "Seat at the Table", "Devops Handbook", "Lean Startup", "The Agility Shift", "Leading the Transformation", "Infrastructure as Code" and more.
My preferred technologies for UI Automation are Ruby, RSpec and Selenium through Capybara.
I have a passion for new technology and using it to provide users with practical solutions to their needs.
I'm a Stack Overflow fan as I enjoy learning and sharing knowledge, plus I spend quality time on Software Quality Assurance and Testing.
Though I consider myself a proud geek, my friends, colleagues and co-workers tell me that my greatest asset is my attitude and proven experience by working well with both technical and business users and understanding the needs of each.

To provide users with useful and innovative solutions.
To learn from others while sharing my own extensive knowledge, skills and experience.
To do the above in a fun, relaxed, environment, focused on the work with no big egos.

Github: https://github.com/durrantm
Blog: http://durrantm.wordpress.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/durrantm
Resume: http://michaeldurrant.com/resume.html
Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/users/631619/michael-durrant

May 2019 - current   Snap2web
Engineer
Building a variety of Event Driven Applications.
Using aws Lambda, APIgateway, SNS and Dynamodb in a number of different ways to create
decoupled, highly available, fault tolerant widgets.
Using Cloud Formation to create resources from Infrastructure As Code.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect SAA-C01 July 2019
AWS Certified Developer DVA-C01 August 2019
AWS Certified Sysops Administrator SOA-C01 October 2019

June 2017 - April 2019   Sallie Mae, Newton MA / Indianapolis IN
Manager, Data Architect and Agile Thought Leader
Working to help transform people, technology used and most of all culture.
As a manager and architect in the quality space I've become a huge advocate for a lean agile approach
Interviewed and hired 30 engineers, currently leading them to good practices
Constantly exploring better XP programming and collaboration methods, fan of code reviews
Using a new toolset for me - VSTS, Visual Studio and C# along with my open source favorites

June 2015 - May 2017   EverQuote, Cambridge MA
Manager and Senior Quality Engineer
Worked as the first Quality Engineering Manager, introducing best practices to Everquote.
Wrote automated tests at Functional UI levels using Ruby, RSpec, Capybara and Selenium.
Performing Manual and Exploratory testing.
Hiring and training junior engineers and interns (who tended to return).

Nov 2013 -June 2015   Zipcar, Boston MA
Senior Quality Engineer
Worked on a variety of Rails applications that are used for Car Sharing.
Created Unit, Integrated, Performance and Load regression tests and performed Manual and Exploratory testing using Ruby, RSpec, Capybara, Selenium and Site Prism.
Used Jira and Trello for issue tracking, Fisheye for code review and Jenkins for the CI environment.

Jul 2012 - Oct 2013   The District Management Council, Boston MA
Rails Developer & QA Specialist
Worked on a variety of Rails applications that help school districts manage their resources and schedule their staff for both General and Special Education. Worked to develop new functionality and also to QA all development effort as the single QA engineer at the company. Used jQuery, Rails versions 3.2.11 and tools such as git for the DVCS, Selenium and Rspec for testing and Pivotal Tracker for project tracking

Jan 2011 - Jul 2012   Boston Agile Partners, Cambridge MA
Rails Developer
Worked on a variety of client (Rails) applications, from a Hospital Survey tool to a Salesforce assistant to a Real Estate application. Worked to develop new functionality and convert poorly engineered applications to more standard RESTful simple code. Using mostly jQuery and Rails versions 2.3.8, 2.3.11, 3.0.3, 3.1 and 3.2 and tools such as git for DVCS and Pivotal Tracker for project tracking

May 2003 - Jan 2009   Children's Hospital, Boston MA
Senior Business Intelligence Developer
Developed data extracts and reports for a large number of users and departments using Business Objects, Crystal Reports with Oracle and SQL Server databases. Used Cold Fusion to voluntarily write a 'Wikipedia' like "CDD" (Common Data Dictionary) internal application for the group with an Oracle backend. Created a number of applications and reporting solutions in a number of different projects with a diverse cross-section of users and opinions, often working behind the scenes to resolve key issues.
Ran a Data Quality Group with a variety of Hospital users at various management levels to identify and resolve complex Data Quality Issues.
I was headhunted into this position by a former colleague, as I wasn't looking for a new job at that time.

2019 AWS certified architect, developer and sysops admin
2016 QA, QE and all things test related in Agile environments
2015 Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
Degree: B.Sc. (Hons) Business Information Technology Studies, Manchester University, UK

I am continually reading new books and learning new techniques and languages and I go to several local meetups each month. I maintain a bookmarks library (A Rails app of course!) of scripts, examples, code & organizations

Antique car restoration (1956 Buick), extreme skiing, Bonsai cultivation, world travel, Ruby.