Working With Rails

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Pearson: April, 2008 – Present, Sr. Software Developer, Iowa City, IA.

Software Development and Systems and Applications Administrator. Ruby/Rails development. Integrating various application web services to build a toolset for Pearson internal customers. Javascript, Ajax, CSS. Agile TDD and BDD development process employed using Test::Unit, RSpec, and Cucumber. Migration of production systems from Ruby 1.8.x to Ruby 1.9.x for performance enhancements of Rails apps. Researching use of NoSql databases Cassandra and MongoDB. Deployement using Capistrano and of JRuby on Rails apps targeting Tomcat web container using warbler. Modified application platforms from from Apache/fastcgi module to utilize Apache proxy to mongrel clusters. God gem used for application monitoring with modifications to match internal requirements. Ruby gem development using soap4r to support Rails applications integration with: Atlassian Confluence, Crowd remote APIs, Serena Teamtrack, Compuware Changepoint. Application and system administration support of Linux based servers and services: Apache Httpd, and Tomcat as a container for various web apps: JRuby apps, Atlassian Confluence, Jira, Crowd authentication. Researched JVM parameters to match various applications: Atlassian Confluence, Hudson, Nexus. Application administration of Perforce SCM tool. Modified the backup procedure to be non-blocking: off loading of checkpoints to an external server. Provide mentoring for junior Ruby developers.

TEKsystems: January, 2008 – April, 2008, Sr. Systems Administrator, Contract position with Rockwell Collins, Cedar Rapids, IA. 

Development of bash and korn shell scripts to trend system resource usage on Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX based workstations using sar (sysstat) and gnuplot. 

Primus Telecommunications: October 1995 – December 2007, Software Engineer, Coralville, IA.

Software Development Duties Software development for the telecommunications industry using C/C++.

System Administrative Duties Experience with scripting languages Perl, Korn and Bourne shells, sed, and awk used for the automation of administrative tasks.

MCI Telecommunications: July 1991 – October 1995, Programmer/Analyst, Cedar Rapids, IA.  

Named on a patent for distributed service access methods.  Enhanced proprietary network transport mechanism built on UDP/IP.  Similar other duties as performed for Primus. 

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Languages: Ruby, Perl, Python, Java, C/C++, Tcl, Bash and Korn shells, awk, sed,   Databases: MySQL, Oracle,  Hardware: Intel, AMD (i386), and Sparc based desktop and server systems, HP and IBM minicomputers,  Operating Systems: Linux, HP-UX, IBM-AIX, Sun Solaris, SCO OpenServer, Windows 200x/XP/Vista.

EDUCATION

MS, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, Dec., 1990