Aidan Musnitzky, Developer in San Francisco, CA, United States

Aidan Musnitzky

Game Development Developer

Location
San Francisco, CA, United States
Toptal Member Since
May 30, 2015

Aidan is a full-stack software engineer with a strong theoretical computer science and mathematics background. He has built mobile/web applications and web services at scale, worked on large-scale projects, and designed and developed various games and products. He has worked on large teams and led small teams, including leading a new internal product team at Amazon Web Services.

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Portfolio

Self-employed
Meteor, Ember.js, Node.js, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby
Amazon Web Services
Shell Scripting, Ember.js, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby
Joburg Center for Software Engineering
CSS, HTML, Java, PHP

Experience

Game Development - 20 yearsJavaScript - 11 yearsWeb App Development - 5 yearsReact - 4 yearsApps - 4 yearsBlockchain - 2 yearsSolidity - 2 yearsEthereum - 2 years

Location

San Francisco, CA, United States

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Shell, GitHub, Sublime Text, MacOS, Linux

The most amazing...

...thing I've coded is a project management/roadmap planning web application that helped solve many internal inefficiencies for EC2 at Amazon Web Services.

Work Experience

2015 - PRESENT

Freelance Software Engineer

Self-employed
  • Work part-time while travelling.
  • Develop using JavaScript for a client who wants a website builder application.
  • Build a shopping cart plugin for a startup and integrated it with their current system in JavaScript.
  • Work on an interactive, animated children’s book mobile app with an artist, which we plan to release in the next few months. (JavaScript/PhoneGap).
  • Complete a social/events web and mobile app for a non-profit organization. (JavaScript/Parse).
Technologies: Meteor, Ember.js, Node.js, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby
2013 - 2014

Software Development Engineer

Amazon Web Services
  • Built tools to orchestrate and visualize Amazon’s fleet of servers and data centers in real time, gathering and exposing massive amounts of data.
  • Responsible for bug fixing, refactoring/rewriting code, new feature dev, new web service dev, tooling and automation, devops, operations, database management, and supporting customers to solve their issues and elicit feedback, requirements, and new directions to take our team in.
  • Built a firewall deployment automation tool that spread and became used by most teams in EC2 and pushed hard to find the root cause of a service issue that led to discovering new customer usage patterns and feature requirements that fed back into the team’s roadmap.
  • Gained extensive experience here in Ruby, Rails, general web service/API development, building scalable web services, operating and supporting web services at scale with hundreds of servers and database configurations, and focusing on creating a great experience for our customers.
  • Started a new team/project - a web app for project management and roadmap planning that would be used by all teams and management in EC2.
  • Technical lead on this project, responsible for all technical design/technology/architecture, for working with our potential users to come up with and implement a design for the app that would solve their problems, for the team’s software engineering methodologies, and for much of the user interface and user experience of the app.
  • Grew and trained the team up to four people and developed an app that all management in Cape Town got on board with. Many roadmap-related problems that they had been having were solved by the app, and their planning processes became much more efficient and effective.
  • Worked with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, Ember.js and HTML/CSS on this project.
Technologies: Shell Scripting, Ember.js, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby
2010 - 2010

Software Engineer Intern

Joburg Center for Software Engineering
  • Worked as an intern on an open source content management system in Chisimba.
  • The team was very big and so bred strong collaboration and communication skills.
  • Developed part of a video lecture application extension for the framework in Java.
  • Wrote some CSS custom themes.
  • Extended the framework in PHP.
Technologies: CSS, HTML, Java, PHP

Experience

Internal Orchestration System

This is a system of web applications and services that visualizes and orchestrates Amazon's full fleet of hardware around the world, and all activity/virtual machines running on that hardware. It is a massive Rails app with hundreds of synchronized databases that I helped develop, build out, and maintain. I also supported it through many issues and changes. (Not publicly available)

Project and Roadmap Management Tool

This is an internal project/roadmap management application for Amazon Web Services. I was the technical lead on this, and our database dealt with people in the organization, their different roles, teams and how they were related through projects. We built an Ember.js front end app, a rails back-end, and some MySQL servers for the database. It also has reporting/analysis capabilities. (Not publicly available)

iheartjew

A small events and social application for an organization in South Africa. It is written in JavaScript with Ember.js, and Parse for the back-end. It aims to help the organization list and subscribe people to their events, and have attendees share photos and communicate/comment with each other. It is also designed to work for mobile.

Skills

Languages

JavaScript, Solidity, CSS, HTML, Java, SQL, Python, Ruby, PHP, Objective-C, Scala, C++

Frameworks

Famo.us, Ember.js, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Mach-II, PhoneGap, AngularJS

Libraries/APIs

React, POCO, jQuery, TensorFlow, Node.js

Tools

Ethereum Plasma, CppCMS, Sublime Text, GitHub, Shell

Platforms

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Blockchain Platforms, Blockchain, Ethereum, Windows, Ubuntu, MacOS, Linux, Parse, Meteor, Firebase

Other

Customized Blockchains, Ethereum Open Source, Ethereum Smart Contracts, Apps, Games, 3D Games, 2D Games, Bitcoin, Game Development, Game Design, Web App Development, Software Development, Front-end Development, Cordova, Game Theory, Scalability, Web Services, Mathematics, Shell Scripting, Economics, Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Paradigms

UX Design, Model View Controller (MVC), UI Design, Test-driven Development (TDD)

Storage

MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL

Education

2011 - 2011

Honour's Degree in Computer Science

University of Cape Town - Cape Town, South Africa

2007 - 2010

Bachelor of Science Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science

University of Witwatersrand - Johannesburg, South Africa