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Resume

My focus has always been on the human side of development - I love to bring unknown techniques to the forefront and make them accessible for everyone. I work best in diverse teams, and have worked remotely for over 10 years. Let's create something amazing together!

Check out my GitHub for more, and please bug me via email: nick@quaran.to.

— Nick (@qrush)

Work

Wistia

Director of Platform Engineering (2022-present)

  • Updates soon…

Engineering Manager (2020-2022)

  • Managed 5 direct reports on the App Platform team to development new primitives/building blocks for the entire Engineering department
  • Introduced ADRs (Architecture Decision Records) into use and led their adoption as a way to build consensus on big problems
  • Led/directed projects to move Wistia’s CI system onto GitHub Actions, centralized documentation via Spotify’s Backstage, helped formalize our visual design system as its own package via Storybook/NPM

Staff Software Engineer (2019-2020)

Chatterbug, Engineering Lead (2017-2019)

  • Helped launch a new language learning service using WebRTC in October 2017
  • Performed code reviews, mentored mentor more junior members of the team, assisted in planning software iterations
  • Led a revamp for internal communication, from how all-hands meetings work to daily information sharing across the company and 3 different timezones
  • Ensured infrastructure uptime for our customers and set up alerting for critical services

Agrilyst, Senior Engineer (2016-2017)

  • Continously delivered a Rails 5 / React app to track data for indoor farmers and growers
  • Mentored and pair-programmed with junior developers and get them up to speed with Rails and JS
  • Maintained an API for external temperature, nutrient, and soil sensors to visualize their data
  • Worked directly with customers to diagnose issues and with hardware vendors to integrate their equipment

Basecamp, Programmer (2011-2016)

  • Launched, improved, and maintained two major new products: Basecamp 2 in 2012, and Basecamp 3 in 2015.
  • Developed the company's first in-house iPhone app.
  • Redesigned and reinforced our application to work on every iOS device, established a team working on native applications on iOS and Android.
  • Created a knowledge base for the company's internal services and apps to assist with on-boarding for new employees.

thoughtbot, Web Developer (2009-2011)

  • Shipped several client projects involving microdonations, social media, and integrations with iOS applications.
  • Contributed to many OSS libraries, including paperclip, clearance, and factory_girl.
  • Mentored junior developers in the company's budding apprenticeship program.
  • Launched a product to help visualize Redis data.

Internships (2005-2010)

I worked for several organizations while in college, including:

I focused mostly on web technology - ASP, ASP.NET, JavaScript, C#, and discovered Ruby.

Open Source Contributions

  • RubyGems.org - Started in 2009 as "Gemcutter", now serving Ruby gems for everyone.
  • RubyGems Guides - Modernized RubyGems' documentation with up-to-date tutorials.
  • Jekyll - Maintained the library, cut down issues, built out an extensive test suite.
  • Ruby on Rails - 11 patches and counting.
  • sub - A simple way to organize shell programs with subcommands like git or rbenv.
  • motion-layout - A iOS6+ auto layout DSL for RubyMotion apps.
  • m - An RSpec-inspired test runner for Test::Unit and MiniTest.

Side Projects

  • Mx. Desk - A coworking billing service, formerly known as Desktime.
  • CoworkBuffalo - Buffalo's premier Coworking community, which I cofounded in 2012.
  • NickelCityRuby - 200 people visited Buffalo to celebrate Ruby in 2013 and 2014.
  • OpenHack - A framework to host social coding meetups. Spread to 80 cities and counting.
  • pickaxe.club - Weekend-only Minecraft server hosting.

Writing

Googling a git question? You may have run across my git ready knowledge base. If so - thanks for reading!

Here's some of my favorite samples:

Check out more at my archive.

Talks

Not counting lightning talks, where I've written twitter bots on stage and made silly GIFs of myself:

Recognition

Ruby Hero Award, 2010

Interviews / Press

Education

Rochester Institute of Technology, 2005-2010 B.S. in Software Engineering, B.S. in Computer Science

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