Ed Mays

I speak, read, and write English natively. In 2013 I visited Ecuador for the first time and fell in love with the culture, history, and people. In 2015 I emigrated from the US to Ecuador, which has been my home base ever since. Fun fact - I live in a small town, but I have dual 100MBPS fiber connections direct to my home :)

My first experience with mentoring began over 25 years ago when I started a business tutoring fellow students in the Electronics program at my college. As the business developed, I learned that I truly enjoy helping others gain understanding of complex topics. Over the course of my career, I have continued that trend on projects I've been involved in, offering guidance on process improvement, best practices, patterns, and general C# coding, helping hundreds of colleagues advance their careers. I tend to use an 'Applied' approach when mentoring: I use real-world tools and processes (for example, GitHub for coding collaboration, certain aspects of Scrum for process improvement) in my teaching sessions in order to help my students become comfortable with professional development tools and workflows.

I have been a C# engineer since 2004, using the Microsoft stack to create software products for companies ranging from tiny startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Test-Driven Development has been the cornerstone of all the software I have written over the past 8 years. At first it took me a little while to 'get it', but ever since the lightbulb went on, it's been an indispensable tool in both my personal and professional work. I've also taught TDD practices to many of the teams I have worked with over the years, both in greenfield and brownfield environments.

I use SOLID principles combined with test-driven development, refactoring, and design patterns to create scalable, maintainable enterprise applications. Over the course of my career, I have applied these techniques to reduce leaked bugs, eliminate duplicate code, and improve application performance.

I was introduced to WPF in 2010 while implementing specialized video editing and playback software for the legal industry. Over the ensuing 6 years I've come to appreciate the subtleties of WPF binding syntax, XAML view composition, and the MVVM pattern, using them to build multiple successful software products.

Dependency injection is one of the core practices that enable clean, well-architected, and testable code. I have used the inversion of control principle over the past 11 years when architecting and implementing medium and large-scale solutions.