Hi, I’m Chad. I lead small teams at Resource Data building web applications for our clients, mostly public agencies, and I own the cloud infrastructure and pipelines those apps run on from the first architecture decisions through years of running them in production.
Resource Data is a technology consulting firm with offices in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Texas, and I’ve been here 13 years, working out of Portland. I got my start in GIS in 2010 and maps still show up in a lot of what I build. Most of my work now is full stack development and site reliability engineering on AWS, and lately that’s meant modernizing older applications, moving them to the cloud and getting them ready for compliance frameworks like SOC 2 and CMMC.
I also sit on Resource Data’s board of directors, where part of my focus is how the company adopts AI and emerging technology.
Most of the projects I lead run for years, so I build them expecting to be the one supporting them down the road. Infrastructure goes into Terraform from day one, every change runs through a pipeline that lints, tests and scans it before it ships, and monitoring is set up so we hear about a problem before a user has to tell us. Catching a bug in the pipeline is a lot cheaper for y’all than catching it in production once it’s turned into support calls and frustrated users.
Whatever the main goal of a project is, a new set of features, a cloud migration or a SOC 2 Type I/II audit, I plan the work so it also leaves the application more scalable, stable and resilient, easier to maintain and operate, and nicer for the next developer to work in.
I do a lot of the work before a project starts too, scoping it, estimating it and laying out the architecture with the client, so the person making those early calls is the same one who’ll be living with them in production. When something does go wrong I’ll tell you right away, along with what caused it and what we’ve already done about it.
I’ve been on the Burn Portal since 2018, when we rebuilt DNR’s burn permit tracking system as an offline-capable progressive web app, and I lead the team that builds and runs it today. It’s a React front end over an ASP.NET Core API on Amazon EKS, with the infrastructure managed in Terragrunt, deployments going out through ArgoCD and sign in brokered through Keycloak to multiple Identity Providers.
WeatherCams puts aviation weather camera imagery and flight planning tools in front of pilots and forecasters. I co-led the program as its infrastructure lead and SRE, ran the migration of the React and Node.js application and its databases off Google Cloud Platform and onto AWS, and built the Terraform modules, container builds and vulnerability scanning pipelines it runs on.
Orgo, “DOD’s Smartest Directory,” is a startup building a dynamic org chart application for a U.S. Air Force test group. I lead the application architecture and technical direction, with most of the design effort going into client-side rendering so the app stays quick with a lot of data on screen, and I scaled the team up by bringing in and leading more engineers from Resource Data. It’s a TypeScript stack with a React client over Express and PostgreSQL on AWS.
A monorepo of reusable Terraform modules for standing up a CMMC compliant AWS environment, with secure CI/CD, automated testing, guidance for using AI tooling safely and a working example of producing the artifacts an assessor needs to see. New compliance-focused engagements start from it so the foundation’s already proven before we write the first feature.
ORCA is a tablet application that lets people onboard West Coast fishing vessels record fisheries data straight into a database, replacing paper forms that used to get keyed into an Access application by hand back on shore. I led its design and development across several versions, and it’s still in use today.
TASC is the intranet application NWSDS staff use for scheduling and case management, along with case load and consumer information reporting. I built it and I’m still supporting it.
I built a new portal, replacing a deprecated Silverlight application, where Oregon businesses pay into and receive disbursements from the state’s universal service fund. PUC staff get admin views for managing the companies and the fund, and I’m still supporting it today.
Every Pacific Air Forces base uses the GeoBase Web Mapping Viewer, and its framework and codebase had fallen out of date, so we built a new one. I led the UI and UX design and built toolsets on it for fuel tracking, capital improvement projects and backflow prevention, among others.
Fish Trax tracks commercially caught fish from sea to table for dealers, retailers and consumers. I moved the application off DotCloud, a deprecated PaaS, and onto AWS, and later led the UI design for the Oregon Salmon Commission’s rebuilt FishTrax Portal, including its web map, and set up continuous integration for it.
A custom web map for querying and visualizing well and resource data spatially and in tables. I led the design and build of the main map interface and worked directly with the client’s staff on custom search tools that fit their workflows.
I use AI coding agents every day for spec-driven and agentic development, across GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Gemini. A lot of our clients decide which AI tools their contractors can use, so I keep our teams proficient in whichever one a client has picked, set up project-specific instructions and skills tuned to each codebase, and coach teams on getting good results out of them.
I started as a GIS programmer, grew into full stack development and then cloud infrastructure and SRE, and I’ve led project teams since 2019.
I built a public web map of wildlife sightings.
I built a geometric network of the county’s storm drain system for flow analysis.
Resource Data has offices in Anchorage, Juneau, Boise, Houston and Portland, and a lot of roles can be remote since most of our clients are open to remote team members. Our career paths cover software development, systems engineering, data engineering, GIS, business analysis and project management, and open positions are posted on our careers page.
The teams I lead are small, so everybody owns features from the database through to production, and every pull request gets a review from a teammate before it merges. There’s plenty of room to grow into infrastructure and SRE work if that interests you, which is the same path I took coming up from GIS.
Away from the keyboard I’m usually snowboarding, brewing beer, top roping or bouldering, or playing with my kids. That’s Pivo with me in the photo.
Whether it’s a project, a role at Resource Data or anything else, email me at chadmarchdev@gmail.com or find me on LinkedIn, which is also where you’ll find recommendations from people I’ve worked with.
