Brian McDaniel

Brian McDaniel is the Chief Technology Officer at Beech Valley Solutions, a company that specializes in the gig economy for the accounting industry. Brian has been with the company for 2 years and 10 months, during which time they have overseen the development of the company's custom-built staffing and fulfillment platform. This platform provides an easy way for clients to search, manage, and hire consultants from a database of vetted, top-tier accounting professionals. For the internal team, the platform provides tools for managing the high volume of applicants to the network, allocating open positions among the team, streamlining the fulfillment process, and more. Brian is responsible for adding new capabilities for both the clients and internal team, and they are always looking for ways to improve the platform. Brian is a strong believer in automated testing, CI/CD, code reviews, and architecture planning.

Before joining Beech Valley Solutions, Brian was a freelance software engineer for 6 years and 8 months. During that time, they worked on a wide range of projects using various tools and technologies. Brian was also a frontend consultant on an EdTech product whose codebase grew from a 1,000 line AngularJS 1.2 app into a 100,000 line Angular 2+ app over 6 years. Brian spearheaded several large migrations that enabled the small dev team to keep up with feature requests while still writing maintainable, tested code. Brian has also worked on a system for real-time updates and collaborative editing using Pusher, Angular, and Ruby on Rails. In addition, they were the sole developer on an academic data visualization project. The client had existing designs, and Brian created a pixel-perfect app to match. Brian built the site as a static React app and used Highcharts for the visualizations. Brian has also done tech assessments for existing codebases to help clients understand the risks and opportunities with their projects. Usually, this starts because the software is getting buggier and harder to change. Brian helps implement best practices, like automation and testing, to combat bugs and increase velocity. Brian has also done various development infrastructure improvements for a number of projects, including setting up continuous integration, dockerizing development and production environments, setting up automated deployments, and migrating build systems.

Brian McDaniel has a Master of Science (MS) from Virginia Tech in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Science (BS) from Virginia Tech in Computer Science. Brian has a 4.00 GPA from Virginia Tech and a 3.84 GPA from Virginia Tech.