Boston University

Software Architect & Engineer, Founder & Entrepreneur, Product Developer

Senior iOS Engineer

Propelytics is an analytics-focused marketing agency that helps business owners drive sustainable revenue growth via optimized online presence & marketing programs.

Propelytics

Advisor, Startup & Early Stage Ventures

The Underscore Core is a curated group of exceptional entrepreneurs, executives, and experts who work in partnership with Underscore VC, an earliest stage venture capital firm, to identify transformative entrepreneurs and support them as they build iconic companies. Core Members have collectively built hundreds of companies, created thousands of jobs, served millions of customers, and created billions of dollars in value for their stakeholders.

Underscore VC

Core Member

WePay

Senior Mobile Software Engineer (iOS)

WePay was acquired by JPMorgan Chase & Co.. Please see relevant experience under JPMC.

Mobile Software Engineer (iOS)

JPMorgan Payments Engineering develops payment solutions for small-and-medium sized businesses. As part of the Card Present team I worked on enabling merchants to accept in-person card payments.

Card Present offered two native SDKs, one for iOS and one for Android. I was in charge of developing, and later re-architecting, our iOS offering. The SDK interfaced with multiple types of card readers through either Bluetooth or LAN. This was deployed with multiple PoS platform providers, plus the Chase banking app, and is currently live today.

I also led the development of incremental authorizations, also known as bar tabs, a major use-case for bar and restaurant settings. Incremental authorizations allows a merchant to run an initial transaction, and continue building the amount as the tab increases, without running multiple authorizations on the customers credit card.

Payments authorized through our SDK would originally need to be sent to our servers for capture by the application directly. I developed an entirely new feature-set in our SDK allowing authorizations to be captured, voided, and refunded, all through the SDK without necessitating a direct server integration. This significantly eased integration effort. The SDK also featured caching of failed transactions and automatic retries.

Telemetry, allowing for metrics tracking and remote debugging, was built out entirely in-house. I developed an event-based logging framework that would batch and send significant events to our servers for storage and processing.

JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Successfully navigated a pivot by productizing an internal remote server access tool. Designed and developed a web-based platform enabling access to SSH servers through a shell-like environment, plus user registration and login, remote server management, and combining multiple shells into one session.

BastionZero

Front End Lead

UFirst is an early-stage accelerator for bold first-time founders. With only a handful of founders selected each year, UFirst provides each Fellow with personalized mentorship, access, and programming.

UFirst Fellow

Also known as Arwen, we developed the most secure way to trade on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges, bridging the gap between traditional centralized and decentralized exchanges allowing for a "best-of-both-worlds" trading experience. 

Working alongside designers and product developers, I architected and developed all of our user-facing software. This included a cross-platform desktop app for non-custodial trading on our layer 2 protocol, using a combination of Angular, Electron, and C#. The app launched with KuCoin, the world's 2nd largest crypto exchange.

Working with Silvergate Bank, I also developed a web-based crypto-to-fiat application that made use of client-side crypto in JavaScript.

I also worked on other aspects of the our software, such as contributing to the blockchain trading protocol, in addition to managing other engineers, providing technical assistance and code reviews ensuring a clean, reusable, and testable codebase, a smooth user experience, and bug-free experience.

Commonwealth Crypto, Inc

Software Architect, Front-End Lead, and Full-Stack Engineer

Paytronix Systems is an established leader in the restaurant customer loyalty and rewards space based in Boston.

I spearheaded a movement to modernize our front-end by creating a framework for setting up new applications and unifying styling across products.

I was also the primary developer on a tool that enabled marketing departments to set up and broadcast time-restricted campaigns through email, text message, and push notifications. Working directly with our product team I had a big impact on the visual- and user experience design of the feature, as well as its software architecture.

Paytronix Systems

Software Engineer

Stickify is a creativity-in-communication tool allowing you to express yourself using completely custom and one-off stickers in iMessage.

Stickify was created as a response to the new iMessage application capabilities introduced by Apple in 2016. As the founder of Stickify I have been involved in the product development, design, and engineering aspects.

Stickify

Founder

A subsidiary of NTT Data, Everis is a multinational technology consultancy firm serving the Boston-based North American subsidiary of Santander Bank, one of the world’s largest banking institutions.

I was part of a global team from the United States and Spain developing a proof-of-concept Big Data platform for Santander Bank to store and process their vast amounts of customer– and transactional data. This was part of an organizational-wide effort to modernize their existing systems while maintaining data from former Sovereign Bank.

This experience taught me a lot in terms of software development and engineering, teamwork, collaboration, and working with big systems.

everis

TransKey is developing technology to break down language barriers and bringing the world closer together. Part of this is a best-selling keyboard extension for iOS, allowing its users to communicate with anyone in any language, all without leaving their preferred chat-app. 

Today TransKey is serving over 300,000 active users and processing over 15,000,000 translations per month, and has been featured in the App Store and various publications numerous times.

As the founder of TransKey I have contributed to every step of the creation of the product, including development of over 40 updates, backend and database systems, interface and experience design, marketing, and more.

TransKey was part of Underscore VC's UFirst Summer Accelerator of 2019.

TransKey

Founder & Developer

Developed an iOS-based application that enabled users to save their parked car location, along with various metadata, and get directions back on-demand using an integration with Apple Maps. 

Unlike the competition, ParkIt also allowed you to save the time your parking expires and using your device's GPS would constantly pull your location in the background and send you a notification when you needed to start walking back to reach your car in time. This is a feature I haven't seen replicated elsewhere and enabled users to roam worry-free regardless where they are.

I also developed an Apple Watch extension entirely without an Apple Watch for testing, using the original WatchKit framework, available on Day 1. Also available in Norwegian, this was the first Norwegian Apple Watch app which was picked up by publications such as ITAvisen.

ParkIt reached international acclaim, having been featured in numerous publications, and graced the App Store top charts for several months at a time. Over the course of multiple years ParkIt amassed several hundred thousand downloads.

ParkIt

ToDo started as a simple to-do list tracker for iOS, but over time grew into something so much more. ToDo offered its users the ability to break down a task into multiple items, attach pictures and notes, and even share specific lists (such as grocery lists) with others through an integration with Facebook. ToDo would update in real-time as other users were modifying, checking off, or adding to your list– and send push notifications if the app was not running.

The backend was initially home grown, running an Apache server using PHP and MySQL on a domain hosted by One.com. Subsequently I changed the backend, while the app was live, to the hosted version of Parse. 

Over its 2 year run ToDo managed to fill a niche for a simple and clean, yet powerful to-do list, before Reminders existed, and amassed a substantial and loyal customer base of several thousand.

ToDo

Through the pseudonym Alekapps I have created numerous applications for web and mobile, some of which have received acclaim as their top apps in their respective categories and reached over 10,000,000 downloads.

Alekapps

Entrepreneur

Developed a web-based social media aggregator allowing users to SSO to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+, view all feeds in one convenient place, comment, like, and post to multiple platforms at the same time.

Feedlobby also provided an RSS reader that combined multiple news sources into one feed, as well as a unified search-engine interface combining Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Wikipedia into one site.

Built out a full user authentication system on top of Apache and MySQL using PHP, including email verification and account recovery. Developed completely using vanilla JS and CSS, with no frameworks or cloud-in-a-box solutions.

Aleksander Skjoelsvik