Resume

Joined a fully distributed software team tasked with maintaining a legacy Rails application. Nobody else on the team had used Ruby or Rails before joining, so my role has been to field questions, guide them toward best practices, improve the test suite, and mentor the other engineers. I've also transitioned their multi-factor authentication flow from a deprecated API to a new one without disruption to the user base, and done a fair bit of cleanup in some areas of Ruby code that haven't seen much maintenance for a while.

The company created a new Staff role for me, largely oriented around the theme of "helping people around me level up." It was a combination of internal consulting, ongoing professional development for other engineers, and running a new Technical Apprenticeship Program (TAP) aimed at providing a pathway onto the engineering team for internal candidates.

Returned to Real Geeks. Spent some time updating a small app for posting ads to Facebook using their Marketing API. Then continued refactoring and maintaining the custom CRM and other associated Rails apps. Wrote a library to simplify OAuth-based SSO by allowing us to remove Omniauth.

Joined a new team responsible for deprecating the flagship application performance monitoring product (RPM), mitigating security risks and removing features that had reached end of life. Left after four months—while the team was amazing, the project was not a good fit. (I was intrigued by the idea of using my refactoring skills to safely decommission an application, but it turns out that I get a lot of satisfaction from keeping an application maintainable, and killing an application I'd used since 2008 was surprisingly difficult for me.)

Joined a growing team responsible for a legacy Rails codebase with the goal of improving code quality and test coverage, building a culture of pair programming, and adding new features. Started a new Rails app for managing email drip campaigns, and created another Rails-based microservice to import email into a custom CRM and perform two-way event sync with Google Calendar. Completed multiple significant refactoring efforts, each involving extensive changes to areas of code that had been "too complicated to touch" for years.

Developed features for multiple Ruby web applications and microservices, designed developer work processes, mentored other developers.

Maintained and refactored a large monolithic Rails application, formed a new team to work on internal finance-related applications, took ownership of a complex system for calculating sales commissions and eventually removed 23K lines of code from the monolithic app, replacing it with a smaller and cleaner single-purpose app.

Developed and maintained Rails applications, extracted code into internal libraries, contributed to process changes for a five- to eight-person development team, organized and gave "Lunch & Learn" presentations, provided personalized in-house training for less technical stakeholders.

Maintained multiple forked versions of several different base apps written in Rails. Wrote a significant amount of code to lay out items in PDF catalogs generated from one such app.

Maintained and extended five bespoke Rails applications with a combined total of 3,000+ active users.