Alex Rattray, Developer in San Francisco, CA, United States
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Alex Rattray

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

San Francisco, CA, United States

Toptal member since September 7, 2014

Bio

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

Online Freelance Agency
Emacs, React.js, Ruby on Rails, Ruby
Funded/Profitable Stealth Startup
AWS, Python, Git, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, CORS, Amazon S3, CSS3, HTML5, Docker...
Emerald Educational Technologies, LLC
AngularJS, JavaScript, PyQt, Django, Python

Experience

Availability

Part-time

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

2015 - PRESENT
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.
Technologies: Emacs, React.js, Ruby on Rails, Ruby

Software Consultant

2014 - 2015
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.
Technologies: AWS, Python, Git, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, CORS, Amazon S3, CSS3, HTML5, Docker, Django, AngularJS

Co-Founder, CEO, Lead Developer

2012 - 2014
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.”.
Technologies: AngularJS, JavaScript, PyQt, Django, Python
2010 - 2014

Bachelor of Science Degree in Business

The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania - Philadelphia, PA

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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