André.Arko.net

Designing and building tools for on-call engineers, starting with the missing Slack integration for PagerDuty.

Architecture and principal-level software consulting at many Bay Area startups, solving organizational problems with software and communication; business strategy and engineering management as a director at the consultancy.

Solo-founded and bootstrapped a 501(c)(6) non-profit supporting the Ruby language package management system. Raised hundreds of thousands of dollars annually while managing all staff and open source developers. Merged into Ruby Central in December 2021.

For clients, delivered deep expertise in web development, process troubleshooting, and coordination of complex initiatives across teams and divisions. For the consultancy, worked on business development, hiring, and day to day management of the software engineering team.

Co-founded a DevOps/DevEx team, led a team building the first software approved by the FDA for doctors to prescribe to patients, designed and implemented bespoke deployment system using Helm and Kubernetes.

Provided staff augmentation, advice, and mentorship via pair programming, primarily using Rails and Javascript. Architected backend API system for world-famous musician’s iOS app.

Extracted internal libraries for release as open source, maintained multiple external open source projects, and developed conference talk proposals. Provided internal consulting on Ruby and Rails issues, upgraded infrastructure, and paired with junior and mid-level developers for assistance and training.

Maintained, updated, and added new scripts to the FileThis fork of the Wesabe SSU project, used to automate the process of fetching monthly statements from a large variety of financial institutions and utility providers.

Updated legacy Rails application from Ruby 1.8 and Rails 2.2 to Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.2. Provided emergency troubleshooting, security recommendations, and implemented fixes for many known and discovered security and functional issues.

Took over development of a Rails application that provides musicians with an online storefront for sales of music, music videos, and instructional videos. Assisted with development of a Rails-based app providing a JSON API backend for iOS clients.

Built the Tilde website, contributed to the Ember and ember-rails open source projects, and worked as a consultant for client Square to build a next-generation user dashboard using the Javascript framework Ember.js.

Maintained, updated, and added features, unit tests, and integration tests to a legacy Rails application. Architected, designed, implemented, and automated deployment of a web service using Rails and Nginx that manages, updates, and routes requests for hundreds of Python HTTP servers. Designed and implemented a web application at my.plexapp.com that functions as the centralized coordinator of the Plex ecosystem, including user profiles, media queues, clients, and servers.

Worked on Bundler, an open source component of Ruby on Rails 3, as a member of the 3-person core team. Designed and implemented the first version of the Engineyard gem, a command-line tool for deploying Rails applications to Engine Yard’s AppCloud. Maintained and extended the AppCloud application, written in Merb.

Maintained and extended the primary application, written in Ruby on Rails. Extensively developed new frontend portions of the application using jQuery. Installed in-house tools for the engineering team to use, including CCrb, gitosis, and RedMine. Helped develop open-source tools for company communication and git workflow, including Wesabot, git-tools, and git-commit-notifier.

Worked with clients to design, develop, and deploy Rails applications. Projects include solo development of an application for ordering food delivery online, as well as working with a team to develop a social networking site aimed at religious groups.

Developed and deployed multiple Ruby on Rails applications for ReziTech’s clients, including a web storefront for selling mailers and flyers to realtors and a payroll management application. Designed, developed, deployed, and maintained an internal Rails application for customer relationship management.

Designed, developed, and deployed a Rails application to provide online access to a conference hosted at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. The application provided a store to purchase access to the conference sessions, and enabled each viewer to have access to the transcript of each talk, the slides that accompanied it, and background material, all updated in real time while watching the video of the conference session.