Profile

I am a talented programmer who wants to push the limits of what Ruby can do. I want to solve tough business problems so that my customers make money. I believe in building high-quality software through customer collaboration and intelligent development practices.

Community

Technical

Expertise in: Proficiency in:

Experience

Independent January 2009 - Present
  • Used new Rails-related technologies: Haml/Sass, erector
  • Deploying Rails apps with Apache + passenger
  • Sampled various CSS frameworks before settling on 960gs
  • Experimented with different document DBs and DHTs: couchdb, tokyo cabinet, simpledb
  • Writing latest side-projects in Seaside, deploying to gemstone
Engineer October 2008 - January 2009 Oakley
  • Worked on a large-scale Rails deployment
  • Faced first-hand the challenges of working in a massive legacy code base
  • Developed a healthy disdain for corporate environments
Agile Engineer July 2008 - October 2008 Pivotal Labs
  • Worked as a team with an external design firm and business development consultancy (this means a large part of my job was convincing people we don't need so many meetings)
  • Built proprietary search system using Solr
  • Imported, structured, and indexed data from thousands of data sources
  • Deployed Rails apps with nginx + mongrel on ec2
  • Performed interviews and informed hiring decisions for new team members
Software Engineer December 2007 - July 2008 Market 7
  • Worked in a hardcore XP environment. That means real agile, not the empty label most shops give themselves
  • Frequent interaction with end users (corporate and creative)
  • Built out deployment architecture on Amazon EC2 and S3
  • Developed creative techniques for more effective Javascript use (mostly using jQuery)
  • Joined the project mid-way, forcing me to understand and maintain a significant existing code base
  • Performed interviews and informed hiring decisions for new team members
  • Built out video transcoding platform using ffmpeg and mencoder
Programmer January 2007 - November 2007 Twistage, Inc.
  • Built customer-facing software in Rails from the ground up
  • Responsible for planning and implementing architectural changes as needs require
  • Deployment and management of the Rails app across several servers
  • Worked remotely for the first 8 months
  • Implemented database replication strategy using Slony for PostgreSQL
Owner/Operator April 2006 - December 2006 PregoPoker
  • Built, launched, and maintained one of the first public sites built 100% in Rails
  • Worked directly with customers to build a product that they love
  • Sold it to a customer as an investment
Contractor 2004 - April 2006 Grand Junction, CO
  • Worked on small jobs doing mostly Java
  • Wrote OpenAMF as a free, open-source alternative to Macromedia's Flash Remoting
  • Picked up Rails and used it as my preferred tool for developing web-based solutions

Personal

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