Dean Carlson is a seasoned technology leader and CTO with over 15 years of experience bridging hands-on engineering and strategic technical management across defense and commercial projects. He has led large, geographically dispersed teams to adopt Agile and DevOps practices, delivered infrastructure-as-code baselines, and saved thousands of developer hours through automation and reusable testing. As founder of GameDayBot he built and operates a popular open-source fantasy sports chatbot integrated with GroupMe, Discord, and Slack, demonstrating strong full-stack and serverless AWS expertise. His background includes driving platform engineering at the Naval Information Warfare Center, earning multiple awards for cross-organizational impact and securing Authority to Operate for production systems. Comfortable shifting between code and C-suite strategy, he combines deep systems engineering skills (Ansible, Terraform, Lambda, RDS) with a track record of translating complex technical challenges into operational solutions. Based in Charleston, SC, he brings entrepreneurial initiative and a knack for pragmatic automation to scale reliable, mission-critical platforms.
10 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Computer Information Systems, Bachelor of Science Computer Information Systems at Clemson University
GroupMe Discord and Slack Chatbot for ESPN Fantasy Football
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:4 releases, 315 commits, 111 PRs in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Dean primarily worked on implementing and modifying back-end logic for the fantasy football chatbot. Their commits focused on updating the `ff_bot.py` file, which involved modifications to the scoreboard and matchup retrieval functions. They introduced new functions like `get_power_rankings` and `get_trophies`. The user also created a `clock.py` file for scheduling tasks, indicating their involvement in automation and background processing.
Contributions:8 commits, 6 PRs, 27 comments in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Dean primarily contributed to the ESPN Fantasy API project by implementing new features and improving existing functionalities. Their work includes adding an optional parameter for power rankings and unit tests. Further, they focused on fixing merge conflicts and incrementing the version, ensuring the project's stability and maintainability. Finally, the user added backwards compatibility to the league initialization.
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Dean Carlson - Chief Technology Officer at GameDayBot