Alex Rattray
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
San Francisco, CA, United States
Toptal member since September 7, 2014
Alex is an entrepreneur and recent Wharton grad who recently closed a startup and is contracting while he travels. He has built over 10,000 LOC projects from the ground up. He takes great pride in developing absurdly simple user interfaces on architecture that scales.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Python, Babel, Git, Ubuntu, MacOS
The most amazing...
...company I've co-founded is an ed-tech company.
Work Experience
Product Software Engineer
Online Freelance Agency
- Translated 6k LOC from CoffeeScript to ES6.
- Maintained internal JavaScript libraries, assisted both junior and senior engineers with JavaScript as a frequent pair programmer.
- Improved performance of critical pages by 20%.
- Attained top performer rank across a thirty-person engineering team for commits, additions, and deletions in 2016 (caveats apply, of course).
- Built many, many features in Rails. Fixed many bugs.
Software Consultant
Funded/Profitable Stealth Startup
- Oversaw a junior developer: Performed code reviews, provided architectural oversight, etc.
- Designed and built a complete front-end SPA.
- Wrote and integrated a REST API to interact with the front-end.
- Built Docker server images and automated the build/deploy workflow. Deployed them using Git for app code deployment along with Docker and AWS Elastic Beanstalk for full deployment.
- Wrote a robust, configurable, and scalable worker queue supervision system using AWS.
Co-Founder, CEO, Lead Developer
Emerald Educational Technologies, LLC
- Led a team of three developers and three non-technical people.
- Developed a desktop application for Windows and OS X using the PyQt framework. Read a bunch of Objective-C.
- Built a custom cross-platform auto-updater for the desktop application.
- Built technology to prevent students from cheating on exams, even when using their own computers.
- Designed an intuitive document editor described by users as a simple version of Google Docs.
- Implemented Diff-based, offline-first, real-time document sync, including revision history. It was thus robust against Internet failure or computer crashes during an exam.
- Designed an intuitive exam administration experience for tech-averse teachers and professors. It was described by one instructional technologist as being “the simplest education technology product I’ve ever seen.”.
Education
Bachelor of Science Degree in Business
The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania - Philadelphia, PA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
React.js, Node.js, Backbone.js, jQuery, PyQt
Tools
Babel, Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Sketch, Sublime Text 3, Git, Emacs
Languages
ECMAScript (ES6), ES7, JavaScript, Python, CoffeeScript, SQL, Ruby, HTML5, CSS3, Haskell, R, Go
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails, Sails.js, Koa, Flask, Django, Express.js, AngularJS
Platforms
iOS, Docker, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS, MacOS, Linux, Windows Development, Ubuntu
Paradigms
Functional Programming, Rapid Prototyping
Storage
PostgreSQL, Amazon S3, Memcached, Redis
Other
Front-end Development, Lean Startups, CORS
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