David Dollar

Summary

• I am a Ruby programmer.
• I use a Mac to write software.
• I am a firm believer in the aesthetic quality of well-written code.
• I am always looking for opportunities to improve and grow my skill-set.
• I am always looking for interesting problems to solve.
• I appreciate simple, elegant solutions.

Skills

• Ruby
• Extensive experience with Rails and Sinatra.
• Released a number of Ruby open-source projects, including Rack middleware and Rails plugins.
• Active participant in the Ruby community.
• Software Engineering
• Experience working for both product and services companies.
• Strong understanding of a very diverse set of languages and tools on a wide variety of platforms.
• Have developed and released successful applications in Ruby, PHP, Perl, C#, C, VB, ASP, and ASP.NET on Mac, Windows, and *nix.
• Open Source
• Major contributor to Gemcutter
• Multiple contrubutions to a variety of open-source projects , including Rails and Net::SSH
• Awarded as a Hackfest finalist for contributions to Rails.
• Have released dozens of utilities and libraries to the community available as open-source.
• Author and maintainer of Shoebox Rails plugin.
• Author and maintainer of Rack::Debug middleware.
• Systems
• Comfortable with operations aspects of Ruby-based deployments.
• Extensive experience deploying to custom servers, EC2, and Heroku.
• Designed a data-center application stack to host over 200 custom applications.
• Comfortable and experienced with all forms of system administration.
• Extensive shell-scripting experience using Bash, Perl, PHP and Ruby.
• Comfortable with standard *nix command-line utilities.

Experience

• Heroku
  Ruby Cloud Platform Support Engineer
  December 2009 - Present
  At Heroku I am responsible for managing the support infrastructure. My primary duties are diagnosing and debugging issues both in Heroku's platform software and our customer's applications. In addition to direct diagnosis roles I manage the gem interface, update documentation, and work on Heroku's core platform.
  This position offers me a unique opportunity to be involved in a wide variety of projects, methodologies, and libraries as I help our customers adapt their applications to Heroku's scalable architecture and help to solve any issues they encounter along the way.
• Emcien
  Senior Engineer
  January 2008 - December 2009
  At Emcien I was responsible for both designing and building the company's flagship product. Emcien Mix is an enterprise SAAS Rails application designed to improve a customer's product offering through a mix of novel visualization techniques and product line optimization. I work with a large Rails app that is tied to a C backend through bindings and BackgroundRB.
• Silverpop
  Senior Integration Architect
  December 2003 - December 2008
  At Silverpop I led the Professional Services engineering team. Our department was tasked with building custom integrations for Silverpop's clients to their SAAS application, Marketer. As part of these integrations I worked directly with clients to plan, build, and launch custom software that would enable Silverpop's product to be directly integrated with their existing systems. I was also responsible for building and administering the department's datacenter presence.
• EMS Computing
  Lead Developer
  January 2001 - December 2003
  At EMS I was responsible for building a framework for e-Commerce sites in ASP.NET/C#. The framework included the ability to launch multiple sites with different templates, complete backoffice management, and full integration with multiple drop-shipping companies in a full end-to-end management suite. This framework was used to successfully run up to 5 simultaneous storefronts with minimal staff requirements.
• Definition 6
  Senior Software Engineer
  January 2000 - January 2001
  At Definition 6 I worked directly with clients in a Professional Services role designing and building custom web applications for a wide variety of clients.
• Kamtel
  Software Engineer
  May 1998 - January 2000
  At Kamtel I served as the 'Jack of all Tech' building and maintaining their web storefront, datacenter presence, telephony systems, and all general IT tasks.
• Special Needs Services
  Technical Consultant
  March 1996 - May 1998
  At Special Needs Services I worked with the disabled helping to build and train users on assistive technology. We built and installed custom computers, peripherals, custom speech synthesis hardware and early voice recognition systems.

This Site