Bertrand J Kuo
Verified Expert in Engineering
Full-stack Web Developer
Bertrand is a true full-stack web developer who is equally at home editing complex SQL while creating offline-capable mobile web applications using the latest front-end technologies. He takes the time to fully understand problems to ensure that the resulting solution is the right one. Bertrand is currently located in Taipei, Taiwan, but he is willing to move some of his work hours to overlap with US East Coast morning hours if necessary.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Git, RubyMine, Ubuntu
The most amazing...
...thing I've developed is a mobile progressive web app for note taking that is more responsive than Google's own web app for a similar purpose.
Work Experience
Senior Back-end Engineer
Loop Commerce
- Developed back-end processes to support our main Giftnow gifting service for our eCommerce merchant clients.
- Integrated the system with a large number of merchant product APIs, stored value vendor APIs, and order management system APIs. When APIs were unavailable, I wrote code to automate the same tasks using web automation techniques with Puppeteer.
- Managed our team's deployment and release processes, verifying that each release was fully tested and consisted of only those changes we intended to release.
Ruby on Rails Engineer
F5 Networks
- Designed and developed a web portal used by customers and our support staff.
- Created charts and visualizations key metrics of interest using Highcharts.
- Automated the configuration of F5s and other vendors specialized networking hardware.
- Created an audit log mechanism so that all configuration changes could be tracked.
- Supported efforts to achieve and maintain PCI compliance.
Senior Software Engineer
Flywheel, Inc.
- Designed and developed back-end services for San Francisco's premier taxicab-hailing platform.
Senior Software Engineer
Tapjoy
- Scaled a Rails-based ad-serving platform to handle 30,000 requests per second.
- Migrated platform(s) from Rails 2.3.8 to 3.0.15, and then from 1.8.7 to 1.9.3, and then from SimpleDB to Riak, and from a monolithic towards an SOA architecture.
- Resolved production issues and monitored server health.
- Led a team to deliver new mobile ad products on time against an aggressive schedule.
Mobile/HTML5 Developer
Moblyng
- Built large games (~20,000 LOC on client, ~25,000 LOC on server) in JavaScript and PHP.
- Developed solutions to address mobile device limitations and undocumented device-specific behaviors.
Ruby on Rails Developer
Aon Hewit
- Developed a complex Rails application in an enterprise setting.
- Wrote CSV import and export scripts that handled the many data formats used by various employers and health insurance companies.
- Constructed a system to track agent licensing and certifications.
Experience
F5 | Problem Solving
For a while at F5 Networks, QA was kicking back a lot of our checked code. It turned out that the tickets were not very well specified, so there were often misinterpretations on how features were supposed to work and how tickets could be tested by QA. The solution was to communicate more with fewer assumptions about the reader's available context and background info.
I also learned to use visual aids (screencaps) and restatements to demonstrate my understanding of what any particular ticket is requesting so that if anyone has a different interpretation, the differences could be resolved early.
Flywheel | Work Process
At Flywheel, a decision was made to write new microservices to handle a feature. I opposed this with the rationale that our distributed architecture was already hard to debug and unwieldy and we should extend existing services instead. Once the decision was made to continue on the path of the new service, I committed and offered to build more observability features into the system to help ameliorate the predicted difficulties instead.
Skills
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Grails
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Sidekiq, Vue, Vuex, ActiveRecord, React, EventMachine, Node.js, jQuery, Backbone.js
Languages
CSS, Ruby, JavaScript, SQL, HTML5, HTML, GraphQL, Groovy, Kotlin, PHP, Python
Tools
GitHub, RubyMine, Git, Amazon CloudFront CDN, RabbitMQ, Jenkins, Canvas, NGINX
Platforms
Linux, Ubuntu, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Android, Docker
Storage
Redis, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Riak, PostGIS, Membase, MongoDB, PostgreSQL
Other
Back-end, Full-stack, Full-stack Development, CSV, Mobile App Development, Junos OS
Paradigms
Service-oriented Architecture (SOA)
Education
Master's Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA, USA
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