Resume

ledger of personal capitalism

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 (2019-present)

Director of Platform Engineering (2022-present)

Directed 3 teams with 13 engineers in the Platform Engineering group:
- App Platform (product engineering enablement, testing, CI, security)
- Media Platform (handling uploads, encoding, and delivery of videos)
- Site Reliability Engineering (leading SLO/performance efforts org-wide, maintaining deployment infrastructure)
Developed internal frameworks for communicating work between Product and Platform Engineering:
- “Papercuts” - small issues that slow down a developer’s day-to-day work - for example, a flaky test failure, build issues on machines, or issues that crop up on multiple machines
- “Anchors” - bigger projects that drag down team velocity over several quarters that can be taken on by Platform to speed up a specific Product team or the entire department - for example: feature flags to allow for continuous shipping of new features; modernizing/deprecating services
Managed 20+ vendors for Engineering, including negotiating directly with vendors to obtain better deals at scale and evaluating competitive options
Held the line for the entire business’ Cost of Goods Sold by optimizing cloud spend with AWS, including:
- Implemented budget and spend monitoring to stop getting surprised by costs
- Led the analysis and purchase of Savings Plans to save money on compute costs
- Helped to push spend into AWS Marketplace wherever possible across the business for vendors
Pushed the entire organization forward with modernization efforts, including:
- Made pragmatic calls for vendors that save time for Engineering, especially around security efforts/SOC2 and internal tooling
- Explored into the forefront of Generative AI by developing Cursor rules/MDC’s to assist UI prototyping

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)

Led the effort to re-architect the billing system onto Stripe from Braintree
Rails upgrades, performance tweaks, GraphQL and more!
Watching a lot of cute dog videos

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:

RailsConf 2018 - The GraphQL Way: A new path for JSON APIs
RailsConf 2016 - Awesome Extractions Done Quick
RubyNation 2015 - rubygems.next
#inspect 2013 - RubyMotion: The sleeper has awakened
BarCampRochester 2013 - CoffeeScript: Spartan JavaScript
RailsConf 2012 - Code spelunking in the All New Basecamp
boston.io 2012 - Test Driven Development
CodeMash 2012 - Becoming a Ruby Gemcutter
RailsConf 2011 - Cutting your own RubyGems
Scale 9X - Redis: Data Cheeseburgers
MountainWestRubyConf 2011 - Behind the Keys: Redis Oyster Cult
RailsConf 2010 - Lapidary: The Art of Gemcutting
Ruby Midwest 2010 - Redis: Persistence Power
RubyConf 2009 - Gemcutter: The Next Step in Gem Hosting

Recognition

Ruby Hero Award, 2010

Interviews / Press

1/18/2015 - People Not in the News Commenting on the News: Meet Nick Quaranto
8/14/2014 - Motion Meetup #4 with Nick Quaranto
4/7/2014 - After years of brain drain, young people are moving back to Buffalo
3/14/2014 - Encouraging entrepreneurs at a new co-working space
4/9/2013 - RubyMotion Success Story: Basecamp for iPhone
2/1/2012 - A Chat with Nick Quaranto About RubyGems.org Internals
6/17/2010 - RailsConf 2010 Video Interviews
10/30/2009 - The Future of Ruby Library Distribution

Education

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