Michael Gillian
Senior Software Engineer at Softworld Inc
Gilbert, Arizona, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMichael Gillian is a Senior Software Engineer with 14 years of experience specializing in systems integration, process automation, and harmonizing heterogeneous environments to deliver sustainable value. He combines hands-on backend engineering—contributing to notable open-source higher-education projects like uPortal and Sakai—with pragmatic improvements to CI/CD, security, and release processes that cut cycle times from weeks to minutes. At Softworld and Unicon he built real-time transaction systems, access-control frameworks with Keycloak/OpenID, and an IPSEC management API, while also driving organization-wide quality through automation, standards, and developer training. His background includes production-focused roles at Freescale and in-house modernization work as an IT manager, evidencing a rare mix of operational empathy and deep technical craft. Michael’s work often uncovers the real problem behind expensive surface fixes, favoring process and integration over throwaway tool spending.
14 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
MBA, Technology Management, MBA, Technology Management at University of PhoenixUniversity of California, Irvine
Github Skills (11)
javas10
grads10
rating10
grades10
spring10
back-end-development10
java10
portlet9
ldap8
gradle7
gradlew7
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
uPortal-Project/uPortal
May 2013 - Jan 2023
Enterprise open source portal built by and for the higher education community.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 17 PRs, 3 pushes in 9 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Michael contributed significantly to the uPortal project, primarily focused on back-end development. They implemented a search launcher portlet, including controller and JSP view components. The commits involved code cleanup, refactoring, and security enhancements like LDAP query injection prevention. They also touched on portlet lifecycle management and contributed to an update to support Java 11.
open-source-portalcommunity-educationgradlesoffithigher-education
sakaiproject/sakai
Oct 2011 - Jan 2012
Sakai is a freely available, feature-rich technology solution for learning, teaching, research and collaboration. Sakai is an open source software suite developed by a diverse and global adopter community.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:91 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily worked on the back-end logic for the Sakai project's assessment management module. Their contributions involved modifying Java code to enhance the matching question type, supporting multiple matches and distractors, and refactoring code to handle the creation and import of calculated questions. They also made improvements to grading functionalities, including scoring and the display of results. These changes indicate a focus on enhancing the assessment authoring and delivery process.
diversesakaivlefeature-richfreely
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