David Ward
Lead Software Engineer at Forefront Laboratories
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDavid Ward is a lead software engineer and founder with 9 years of experience building full‑stack web applications, production SaaS, and developer tooling across startups and enterprise teams. He architects end‑to‑end systems—Rails and Go backends, Java/Spring Boot services, React/React Native frontends, and containerized CI/CD—while owning product lifecycle and compliance for paying customers. At STEM VOODOO he’s scaling an educational platform for 4,000+ underrepresented STEM community members, and his independent studio has shipped TCPA‑compliant SMS marketing and classroom management products. He blends practical deployment skills (Docker, GitHub Actions, Heroku, Azure) with research curiosity—coauthoring an IEEE ICMLA paper and mentoring CS students—bringing both production rigor and a habit of exploring ML theory and hardware tinkering.
9 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at California State University, NorthridgeLower Division Coursework, Chemistry / Computer Science, Lower Division Coursework, Chemistry / Computer Science at Santa Monica College
English
Github Skills (19)
screen-orientation8
ruby-on-rails6
heroku6
paloaltonetworks6
okta5
openconnect5
shortcut4
postgresql4
orientation4
authentication4
azure3
saml3
linux3
yubikey3
vpn-client2
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
davidmakoto/social-media-backend-clone
Dec 2022 - Mar 2023
Bare bones social media clone showcasing modern backend development principles: cloud hosting, CI/CD, unit testing, functional testing, and user authentication.
Contributions:148 commits, 6 PRs, 11 pushes in 2 months
herokupostgresqlruby-on-rails
davidmakoto/davidmakoto
Nov 2021 - Aug 2024
Contributions:25 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 9 months
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