Developer Years Experience
Resume:
Nathan Long
Charlotte, NC
***********@*****.***
Open Source Projects, a Ruby gem that "gives you a clean and easy way to say, in your Rails app, who is allowed to do what with your models"., a jQuery plugin for autosaving user progress in long forms., a jQuery plugin for designers to add panels that can be toggled and remember their state.Patches to Nokogiri, Formtastic, and jQuery Validation.Summary of Qualifications
Technical:Strong knowledge of Ruby, Javascript, and Git.2 years experience building, testing, and maintaining Rails apps.Superb writing and documentation skills.
Personal:I'm driven to improve: read, work, experiment and write.I strive to write code that's readable and self-explanatory.I love working with developers who are curious and encouraging.My whole tool set is open source, so I love contributing back.ExperienceWeb Developer, Tax Management Associates (2010 - present)
Joined a small software team, where I helped to shape development practices.Converted a public web app to use AJAX before its launch two months after I arrived, reorganizing its Javascript into an object-oriented style.Helped write a Rails engine to edit, store, and validate arbitrary tax forms, backed by the NoSQL database Riak.Wrote an internal help ticket management application in Rails, including uploading screenshots using Paperclip and syncing tickets with LightHouse.Used Ruby to automate backup of our Riak and MySQL servers and zipping the files for storage.Trained teammates in Vim and set up standard dotfiles repository.Led technical interviews for two new developer positionsWeb Developer, Red Ventures (2010)
As one of about 30 developers at Red Ventures, I made several valuable contributions.Set up nightly cron job to generate documentation for our very large code base. This meant finding a tool that could actually handle our 84 MB of core classes, and having the tool's author add features to meet our needs.Built a tool for developers to schedule overnight database queries, including permissions for what can be scheduled when and notifications when a query is run or modified.Documented a flexible but complex new system for business metrics, making it simpler for other developers to migrate old code to it.Won an award for tracking down a CSS bug specific to BlackBerry email clients.Wrote a script to generate emails with daily sales numbers; used the factory pattern to enable easy customization for various business units.Web Developer and Tech Support, Vision Wireless (2007 - 2010)
When I arrived at Vision, it was growing rapidly, but new employees weren't getting the training and resources they needed. I saw the need and built an intranet from scratch that most employees rely on daily to help customers with their cell phones and billing.I built a suite of intranet applications from scratch, using PHP, MySQL and jQuery. This included:
Wireless device browser: find devices by name or filter by feature, and click for detailed customer support guides.Personalized phone directory of internal and external phone numbers.Communications UI which vastly improved communications with our partner companies. Included custom validation with jQuery Validate plugin, dynamic field generation, and the ability to save and reload forms.Office map to help new employees learn who sits where, editable via drag-and-dropAdministrative interface for others with no coding knowledge to manage the siteI pushed myself and constantly improved my development practices:
Used agile approach to build intranet: started simple, added as necessaryUsed best practices in both back and front-end develpment: self-documenting function names, normalized database design, careful variable scoping and CSS-driven layout.Kept code under version control, branching and merging for a major revisionUsed good security practices: hashed password storage, parameterized queriesBorrowed great ideas from Ruby on Rails: parameterized DB queries within model objects; automatic browser cache busting based on the time stamps of filesOnline PresenceBlog (sleeplessgeek.blogspot.com)Github (github.com/nathanl)StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/users/4376/nathan-long)EducationUniversity of Georgia, Athens, GAB.A. in Journalism with Honors, Magna Cum Laude, 2003Other TrainingIntensive, all-day Git webinar with Matthew McCullough - 02/11/2011Attended RailsConf 2011BookshelfPhilosophy of programming: Clean Code, The Design of Everyday Things, Joel on SoftwareRuby/Rails: The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Eloquent Ruby, The Rails 3 Way, The Rspec Book, Agile Web Development with Rails, The Ruby WayFront-end development: Javascript: The Good Parts, CSS: The Definitive Guide, Javascript: The Definitive GuidePHP: PHP 6 and MySQL 5: Visual QuickPro Guide, PHP Cookbook
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