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Dave Nguyen
Verified Expert in Engineering
Back-end Developer
Tustin, CA, United States
Toptal member since May 26, 2021
Bio
Dave is an IT veteran with 15 years of programming experience—specializing in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. While he excels at producing Ruby-based solutions, Dave's also delivered projects requiring multiple technology stacks, third-party integrations, and even a little DevOps for companies in the fintech infrastructure, healthcare services, and scaling support industries. Dave's experience has led to easy-to-read, easy-to-maintain, and well-tested code, leaving a trail of happy customers.
Portfolio
Spin
Ruby on Rails (RoR), APIs, PostgreSQL, Datadog, Sentry, Postman
Prime Trust
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby, PostgreSQL, DevOps, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Sidekiq...
Alliance Healthcare Services
Salesforce, Microsoft Excel, Apex
Experience
- Linux - 17 years
- Ruby - 15 years
- Ruby on Rails (RoR) - 15 years
- PostgreSQL - 7 years
- Phoenix LiveView - 1 year
- Elixir - 1 year
- Phoenix - 1 year
Preferred Environment
Ruby, Elixir, Linux
The most amazing...
...decision in my life was to join a startup where I and one other programmer wrote 90% of the code and we moved $16 million of funds within three months.
Work Experience
Senior Backend Developer
2021 - 2021
Spin
- Managed the API by adding new endpoints, ETL jobs, and refactoring to ease maintenance pain.
- Worked on Postman monitors and migrated to Datadog synthetics.
- Worked with new employees to get them up to speed, paired with other teams to add cross-department functionality.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails (RoR), APIs, PostgreSQL, Datadog, Sentry, Postman
Senior Ruby Engineer
2013 - 2020
Prime Trust
- Contributed 90% of the Ruby on Rails codebase with one other programmer to launch a startup within three months and move $16 millions.
- Worked closely with the finance reconciliation department to turn one of their manual processes into an automated solution, saving over 20 people hours per week.
- Integrated multiple third-party services, including SendGrid (email), Vantiv (credit card processing), Trulioo (identity verification), and OFAC checks.
- Onboarded new employees, who were able to start contributing to the codebase within two weeks of joining because of my help.
- Delegated stories to team members, helped them complete their tasks, and reviewed their work.
- Created an entirely customizable email template system, allowing customers to have full control over the look of their emails and when they would be sent out.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby, PostgreSQL, DevOps, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Sidekiq, RSpec, Git, SQL, APIs, JSON API, Ruby on Rails 5, CSS, Ruby on Rails API, REST APIs, Jira, Pivotal Tracker
Business Intelligence Administrator
2012 - 2013
Alliance Healthcare Services
- Developed a customer optimization tracker and coaching plans in Salesforce using the Apex language which provided the ability to track forms and progress in the system. This replaced the Excel sheets that were used previously.
- Created reporting dashboards for the executive staff and three sales channels.
- Performed analytics to determine new expansion sites.
Technologies: Salesforce, Microsoft Excel, Apex
Sales Operations Analyst
2008 - 2012
Apria Healthcare
- Created and maintained performance-and-execution reports used by the executive staff and parent company, Blackstone Group, to make key decisions on expansion.
- Developed dashboards on the CRM On Demand homepage by consolidating six reports that included quota, calls, sales, and key product information and trends.
- Transformed a paper-based sales-team evaluation tool to be managed entirely within CRM On Demand.
- Validated data, reports, and the UI through four release upgrades of the CRM system.
- Improved the performance and decreased run time of Apria’s existing CRM On Demand reports.
- Facilitated and assisted the training during six new sales rep classes and 24 online training webinars annually.
Technologies: Oracle CRM On Demand, QlikView
Student Programmer
2006 - 2008
UCI Computer Store
- Maintained AntPOS3, a student-created, Java-based point-of-sale system.
- Designed, developed, and maintained event websites using Ruby on Rails.
- Used Subversion to create branches and share code among the development team.
Technologies: Java, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Subversion (SVN), MySQL, SQL, JavaScript
Tech Support
2005 - 2006
TechSpace
- Built Linux servers and prepared for them to go on the rack on customer demand.
- Answered calls and visited in-house offices to fix computer-related problems.
- Monitored computer networks from the network operations center (NOC).
Technologies: Red Hat Linux
Experience
FundAmerica
FundAmerica is a technology company for raising capital to empower crowdfunding portals. After signing up and creating an offering, an issuer would simply need to add two lines of code to allow investors to an easy-to-use investment process form! More advanced customers had the ability to hook into the JSON RESTful APIs. You could manage all the services required to support an offering from open to close—including accreditations, broker-dealers, and compliance—within the site's dashboard.
Hearts Game
A single-player version of the popular trick-taking game. I wrote this in a week to showcase what's possible with GenServers. The technologies I used include Elixir, Phoenix LiveView, and Tailwind CSS for the UI.
R2-B2
https://gitlab.com/invadervim/r2b2An Elixir library for dealing with the Backblaze B2 (file storage) API. Users can use the provided client to easily manage their credentials and bucket information and decide if they want to make synchronous or asynchronous calls. If more fine-tuning is required, they can also use this to call the endpoints directly using this library. It also includes a module to help with Ecto schema integrations, allowing the user full control on what metadata to save in the database and what information to grab when queried.
Films Database
A content management system for independent film festivals to track their film submissions. The system allowed filmmakers to submit their films online, which could then be tracked by the staff. Other users, known as "screeners", would be able to rate the films. This gave the staff everything they needed to manage the films through the submission process and make an informed decision on which submissions are accepted into the film festival.
I built this using Ruby on Rails.
I built this using Ruby on Rails.
Promotional Event Websites
The UCI Computer Store would hold quarterly events, such as the 24-hour Mad Film Dash, a competition where students make a film within 24 hours. For each event, a new website was launched, but they all would have similar features, such as registration, media management (uploading video and audio files), a countdown to the event start, email blasts, and judging with audience voting.
The sites could quickly be created using the Ruby on Rails framework.
The sites could quickly be created using the Ruby on Rails framework.
Education
2004 - 2008
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
University of California, Irvine - Irvine, CA, United States
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Sidekiq, Sequel, JSON API, Ruby on Rails API, jQuery, REST APIs
Tools
RSpec, Git, SendGrid, Microsoft Excel, Subversion (SVN), Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Sentry, Postman
Languages
Ruby, Elixir, Java, Assembly, Apex, SQL, JavaScript, CSS
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby on Rails 5, Phoenix, Tailwind CSS, Ruby on Rails 4
Storage
Redis, PostgreSQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MySQL, Datadog
Platforms
Linux, Heroku, Salesforce, QlikView, Red Hat Linux
Paradigms
DevOps
Other
APIs, IT Project Management, Phoenix LiveView, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Reports, Dashboards, Administration, Oracle CRM On Demand
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