Senior Rails Developer - Santa Clara CA 2021 - Current
Designing, building, and maintaining Ruby and Rails applications for collecting payments for merchants, property managers, and online gaming.
About
I've enjoyed exploring programming puzzles since I started learning C and C++ in high school. After graduating, I began using Bash to automate my home network, and writing interactive chat bots in Perl. I was hooked. While writing software for bottled-water delivery, I created my first dynamic web app and have been drawn to the web ever since.
Outside of work, I still find myself drawn to development. I try to learn a new language or framework every year. The exposure to different approaches has helped me immensely in work and personal applications, regardless of language.
When not at the computer, I'm a father, motorcyclist, and bicyclist. Living in Flagstaff, AZ, there is no-end to outdoor adventures to share with my family.
Lead Developer / Systems Administrator / Project Manager - Flagstaff AZ 2003 - 2021
Designing, building, and maintaining applications for selling insurance policies online for a variety of products. This position continually offers challenges by offering multi-tenant Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, with thousands of unique tenants. Each tenant could have its own template, verbiage, and even functionality. In addition, many tenants had specific browser requirements which restricted technology choices across the applications. The applications were featured by carriers such as Allstate, Geico, and Progressive.
Lead Developer since 2003
In my role as Lead Developer, I advance both retail and wholesale operations to offer the best possible user experience when purchasing insurance online. I continually strive to keep the company at the forefront of technology best practices and processes, while delivering the best experience to future and legacy customers.
Over my tenure, I developed and launched nineteen unique insurance products in various languages and frameworks, based on the demands of the product. The applications incorporated all aspects of the business, from COVID informational websites to monthly accounting.
Skills
- Ruby / Rails - 6 years
- Perl - 20 years
- Javascript - 14 years
- Python 2.7 - 3 years
Systems Administrator since 2004
In my role as Systems Administrator, I am responsible for ensuring the stability of technology systems within the company. This includes transitioning from an on-premises data-center to a co-located remote data-center, and eventually to cloud hosting with Azure and AWS.
I also implemented a complete architecture migration from AWS EC2 instances to Kubernetes, cutting the AWS bills by 50%. This change also improved uptime, resiliency, and release velocity, while simplifying the overall architecture. This architecture also increased uptime to 99.99% since deployment.
This role encompasses not only researching, designing, implementing, and testing the systems, but also 24 x 7 x 365 on-call support. Additionally, I am responsible for ensuring the design and performance of the databases backing the applications and websites.
Skills
- Docker - 6 years
- Kubernetes - 3 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 6 years
- MySQL - 17 years
- PostgreSQL - 3 years
Project Manager since 2020
In my role as a Project Manager, I helped recover a struggling team of designers, developers, and systems administrators, to be reach their full potential. After only a few weeks, the team was hitting deadlines and shipping mission critical changes, without resorting to “crunch”.
In light of my success, I was also assigned to reinvigorate other struggling teams, helping to successfully align the teams’ output with the requirements provided from upper management.