Project Software Developer

Derek Harmel

I practice Agile Development and believe in the Lean Startup ideals.

With 8+ years experience as a

generalist in web development, I can help you:

take your product from concept to launchdefine the scope and spec of your projectpay off the technical debt slowing your progressrescue an outsourced project gone badCurrent Skills & Toolchain

Ruby on Rails 6 yrs Ruby 1.8.x & 1.9.x, Rails 1.1.x – 3.2.x

JavaScript 9 yrs CoffeeScript used on recent projects

HTML 13 yrs Haml (4 yrs), HTML5 used on recent projects

CSS 8 yrs Sass/SCSS used on several projects, CSS3, Compass

jQuery 4 yrs Prototype.js was used previously

TDD 4 yrs Rspec, Shoulda, Capybara

RDBMS / SQL 9 yrs PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle

MongoDB 2 yrs Used on five recent projects

Linux 8 yrs Ubuntu, CentOS, Redhat for deployments; OS X for development

VIM 3 yrs Left TextMate for MacVIM, never looked back

Git, Github 4 yrs There's just no going back to SubversionOther Technologies & Experience

Goliath,

Redis,

memcache,

ElasticSearch,

Solr,

REST,

node.js,

Backbone.js,

AWS,

Heroku,

Apache,

Nginx,

Passenger,

Bash,

Capistrano,

ActiveMerchant,

OAuth,

API Integration

Recent Projects

Usage Statistics - RecoveryLibrary.com

For Pat Deegan PhD & Associates, my most signficant contribution was a system for their

customers mental health clinics for gaining insight into how the

members of their organizations are using and benefiting from the RecoveryLibrary

product via collection, aggregation, and graphing various statistical data. This was a critical component

of the offering as it will be used by these clinics to demonstrate its value

to their funding sources. Additionally, PDA will use it internally to hone their product.

Rails 3.2

Draft Scoring - RotoDraft.com

For Impact Fantasy Sports, I was solely responsible for developing one of their

most important features, the scoring of drafts. Due to the complexity and processing

required, their offering is previously unattempted in the fantasy sports market.

As such, considerable planning and testing was required to ensure fault tolerance,

scalability, and throughput.

Product Catalog - CustomInk.com

Rewrote CustomInk's Product Management System to be more flexible and

usable. The legacy system had an inflexible schema and a very tedious

interface. Numerous UX improvements were made over the old system

resulting in a more intuitive and faster UI which enabled the Products Team

to significantly reduce the amount of time needed to add new products. One

of the more challenging aspects of this project was the requirement to

maintain parity with the data in the legacy schema to allow for many integration

points to be migrated piecemeal to the new API.

Rails 3.1

T-Shirt Printer Rolodex - CustomInk.com

Previously, employees tasked with finding a viable printer to fulfill a

customer's order had to manually search through an 80 page Excel workbook.

This data was structured and given a CRUD interface including another UI to replace

the workbook. These employees are now able to search for printers via

certain attributes rather than visually scanning spreadsheets resulting

in gains in efficiency and correctness. This project is a core service of

the system that has allowed CustomInk to automate the majority of its orders.

Rails 3.1

Payment Routing Service - CustomInk.com

This service was created to DRY up redundant code for financial transactions

into a single system and abstract away vendor specific payment processing

idiosyncrasies. My responsibilities involved integrating SecureNet

by developing a new gateway for use in ActiveMerchant and

adding ACH capabilities for Payflow. The system was also capable of

throttling transactions to multiple gateways by setting percentage

thresholds per gateway.

Rails 2.3

Order Fulfillment System - CustomInk.com

My contributions to this project were numerous. I rewrote the system used

for ordering blank products from CustomInk's numerous suppliers which

resulted in fewer errors and increased productivity. This large project that

makes heavy use of AJAX often had significant performance problems.

Through profiling and utilization of techniques like multi-threading I/O operations,

SQL optimization, and preemptively caching expensive requests,

I was able to save several man hours per day.

Rails 2.3

Work ExperienceDouble Pedal LLC

Independent Software Developer & Consultant

Oct 2008 – Present

Development, support, and maintenance of various Ruby on Rails

applications.

CustomInk.com

Software Engineer

Oct 2008 – January 2012

As a member of the Operations Technology software development team, I built

and maintained software in support of the company's ability to fulfill

orders. We were expected to be very autonomous, managing and

developing products from start to finish using agile development

principles.

KCI Technologies

Software Developer / SysAdmin

Nov 2005 – Oct 2008

Built and maintained various PHP and Ruby on Rails applications. I

introduced KCI to Ruby on Rails and iterative development.

This was my first time using Ruby on Rails professionally. Other

responsibilities included system administration for web servers,

Apache, Bind/DNS, email servers, and client project websites.

FocalBase Internet Solutions

Software Developer

Aug 2004 – Nov 2005

Built web applications with PHP for clients and maintained apps developed

before I was hired. Often had direct contact with clients for demos and

requirements clarification.

Black & Decker

Information Systems Intern

Multiple internships

Wrote various web applications in Perl. Assisted with some sysadmin tasks

using KornShell on AIX machines. This was my first experience with *nix and

web applications.

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