Deer Valley USD Portal

Technical lead and backend architect for Deer Valley Unified School District's internal portal. 45,000+ daily users across teachers, students, administrators, and staff. Nearly a decade of active development (2007-2016).

What I owned

• Architecture decisions — researched and selected the frontend stack, backend stack, and local developer environment. Made the foundational technical decisions the rest of the team built on.
• Database architecture — designed schemas, stored procedures, functions, and views. Version-controlled all database objects (schemas, procs, functions, tables).
• Full-text search — researched and implemented Elasticsearch with word stemming, replacing basic SQL queries with real search infrastructure.
• ACL system — built cross-system access control that imported permissions from LDAP (OpenLDAP, eDirectory, ActiveDirectory) so search results only returned items users were authorized to see.
• Cross-system integration — bridged Oracle, MySQL, OpenLDAP, eDirectory, ActiveDirectory, ETL pipelines, SLES, and third-party APIs into a cohesive user experience.
• Developer tooling — wrote internal libraries to support the infrastructure. Built the local dev environment and deployment automation on openSUSE Linux.
• Team leadership — dev lead and mentor. Guided junior developers, reviewed code, made architectural calls.

Scale

This was production infrastructure that a school district depended on daily. Not a prototype, not a demo. 45,000 users, enterprise SLAs, and a phone that rang when things broke.