Principle Full-Stack Rails Engineer with 20 years of experience

There's an inflection point in every startup, where you've got your MVP and some initial customers, and now you need to scale everything. Not just the performance of your application, but entire features to support a new kind of larger customer. You need to grow the team, not just engineering, but product and customer support, and also incorporate the tools to support them.

This is where I'm in my groove, and at my most effective. I've grown teams from 3 to 50+, improved performance while scaling to 100x the load, and designed and built features from the ground up in an iterative and agile manner to minimize time-to-delivery while maximizing flexibility for future work.

I have over 20 years' experience as a "web application" developer, in a variety of languages and technologies. I've been a Rails developer since there was a Rails, releasing my first app on 0.11 in 2005, and have kept up with it since. I'm comfortable working at entire levels of the app stack, from tweaking drop shadows in SCSS to optimizing database queries and debugging stack traces. I have the experience to know when to crank out some quick and dirty code vs take the time to architect a foundation that will scale and provide a platform upon which the team can build stable features for years.

I work with other teams/departments within the company and customers to work to figure out optimal solutions to problems, gathering and balancing the various tradeoffs involved. I also really enjoying pairing with other developers, since we can both learn something new, as well as mentoring and leveling up the juniors.

I'm involved in the various Ruby communities, have spoken at Rubyconf, and frequent the local Boulder Ruby group since its beginning. I've been involved with major Ruby open-source development in the past, like Merb and DataMapper, and am still an active contributor to smaller projects such as Dry-rb.

If you're an early stage startup that has found product/market fit, and needs someone to scale both your product and your team, then I'd be a great choice to help you out.