Senior/Lead Eng to Tech Co-Founder: Deep rails experience that comes with empathy, humor, and a bit of chaos

Seasoned code wrangler with over a decade in Ruby on Rails and a past life as a social worker and policy researcher. I've got a knack for translating geek speak for humans and wrangling stakeholder needs into delighted users and maintainable code. Somehow, most days, I still like my IDE.

Looking to land in a place where code meets impact.

Full stack developer that has spent over a decade in the Ruby/Rails ecosystem. I lean ops -> backend, but I can get in there and wrangle JS components and CSS if need be. I often wear at least a little bit of a product manager hat, have been a team lead on large projects, and I even try to remember to write documentation and technical briefs.

I'm longwinded in slack, shy in person, didactic and friendly in code reviews, and occasionally down a rabbithole.

Loves: Wrangling weird bugs and annoying APIs, refactoring, clear code (for the humans) and good tests (for the robots), figuring out the best places to deliver maximum impact and shipping quickly, teaching myself new things, compassionate communication and collaboration with multiple stockholders, making weird things happen in the CI pipeline

Special superpowers: T-shaped generalist that still geeks out on learning new things, sniffing out something that isn't a problem yet but definitely will be (and I don't mean premature optimization), care a lot about readable code. Worked as a social worker for a decade, there's more soft skills than people might think in getting software out the door.

Not so loves: JS in general, jerks, arrogance, watching junior developers not get the support they need and thinking it is their fault, refreshing staging for an hour wondering why my debugger isn't getting hit.

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Have worked in startups at all stages of their life cycle as both an introverted grumpy solo developer and team leader, helped make product decisions, mentored other developers, deleted prod a few times, etc. I chafe a bit at schedules, but occasionally I'll figure out a big that would have been a big problem in the future at 3am and just fix it. Love fixing those things. I can meeting during normal human hours though.

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Open to short and long term contracts and FTE for the right fit. Prefer chill flat organizations where everyone likes and respects each other and just gets stuff done. I've shipped features faster at those organizations than any that were focused on relentless hustle.

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Tell me why you believe in your tech and I'll tell you about one of my weird side projects like a Led Zeppelin button or a confessional that floats in the air.

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Have PhD level statistics classes buried in my brain somewhere, know my way around python and some data analysis, have built ETL pipelines - if it has to be done, I'll try to figure out a way to get it done. And the longer you hang around this world, you realize the most important programming language is being able to talk to people in kind and useful ways.

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Senior enough to know that sometimes it's the code you don't write that solves the problem ;) Junior enough to still get excited every time I make LEDs blink with magic words.