Chris Schuster
Verified Expert in Engineering
Full-stack Developer
Evanston, IL, United States
Toptal member since February 10, 2021
Chris is a full-stack generalist well-practiced in delivering projects under extreme programming (XP) principles. He's spent several years implementing pair programming and test-driven development in several languages (Java, Kotlin, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and a few others). Chris has also mentored or paired with dozens of client programmers over the years and served as the lead developer on most of his projects.
Portfolio
Experience
- Test-driven Development (TDD) - 12 years
- Linux - 12 years
- Agile - 10 years
- Java - 10 years
- Cloud - 10 years
- Spring - 10 years
- PostgreSQL - 8 years
- Kotlin - 6 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Kotlin, Spring, Java, Linux
The most amazing...
...thing was when the client's head of IT asked to use my estimation engine for pricing—it was faster and 100% accurate as compared to manual work.
Work Experience
Senior Back-end Developer
Daydream
- Created an API to securely connect to user's databases and execute arbitrary read queries. Supported BigQuery, Snowflake, PostgreSQL, and Redshift as customer database engine targets.
- Implemented a topological sorting algorithm to support Excel-style cell references in formulas and properly evaluate said formulas regardless of their row, column, or dependencies (unless their dependencies formed a cycle).
- Developed an API to pivot a user's dataset—supporting up to and past 10 million cells in the pivot table—in under 10 seconds, depending on multiple factors.
- Automated the deployment of new environments through the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), permitting easy release of development, testing, staging, production, and experimental environments.
Senior Staff Developer
Pivotal
- Developed a system to value the trillions of dollars in assets of a multinational bank in minutes for any selected denomination.
- Designed an estimation engine for a health insurer that was more accurate than the (then current) pricing engine.
- Increased the efficiency of an in-house reporting task force by 300% for a data technology client.
- Developed a front end compliant with the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) level AA for a national credit card issuer.
- Created a visualization system to see the (relative) employee efficiency of over 400 healthcare systems.
- Modernized the handling of ACORD data for a national commercial insurer. While developing the new system, we discovered two critical issues with the current systems during a side-by-side comparison.
Senior Developer
Captricity (now Vidado)
- Split up a monolithic computer vision service into four services.
- Created a performance testing framework so that the QA department could execute performance tests against any system and environment.
- Resolved several critical performance issues (one within my first week of joining) that if left unresolved would have led to service level agreement damages in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Developer
Thoughtworks
- Integrated with a documentation-less mainframe to create a system capable of creating over 400 account statements in minutes for a large multinational bank.
- Created an infrastructure-as-code system to deploy an application with a database before the advent of Docker.
- Resolved a severe bug in AWS cloud-formation that prevented resources from being freed. This bug had been open for over four months and the resources that hadn't been freed were billed to the client, a major airline.
Junior Developer
ThoughtWorks
- Reduced the monthly workload of the HR department by 16 hours through automation.
- Maintained a daily ETL system for item indexing in a large-scale auction house in the automotive space.
- Parallelized a single-threaded supply-chain management system for a multinational retailer.
Experience
Healthcare Cost Estimator
https://my.providerfinderonline.com/?ci=IL-NOEX-PUBNETSAs the project's lead developer, I handled the application's general development while also creating a tool enabling side-by-side comparisons against the legacy pricing engine. Despite not being a project goal, this project's general success led to it becoming the primary source of prices in the client architecture.
Discover Credit Card Application
https://www.discovercard.com/application/website/apply?srcCde=KXPAI was the lead developer for this project.
Portfolio Valuation
I was the lead developer for this project. The system needed to value assets that ranged from personal holdings to billions of dollars worth of varied asset types. It processed every portfolio in a matter of minutes (even less when we dedicated more machines to computation).
Education
Bachelor of Science Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science
University of Chicago - Chicago, IL, United States
Skills
Libraries/APIs
JOOQ, REST APIs, AMQP, React, Java Message Service (JMS), Node.js
Tools
JDK 8, Jenkins, Concourse CI, Gradle, Chef, Celery, MATLAB, FreeMarker, Bamboo, Apache HTTP Server, NGINX, Apache Maven, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)
Languages
Java, Kotlin, SQL, CSS, HTML, C, Ruby, Python 2, JavaScript, Scala, Clojure, C++, R, Python, TypeScript
Frameworks
Spring, Spring Boot, JUnit, Spring Security, Hibernate, Spark, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Django, Angular, Hadoop
Paradigms
Test-driven Development (TDD), Agile, Unit Testing, REST, Microservices, Design Patterns, RESTful Development, ETL
Platforms
Linux, Unix, VMware Tanzu Application Service (TAS) (Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF)), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Kubernetes, New Relic
Storage
Databases, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL, RDBMS, Google Cloud, MarkLogic, Redis, MongoDB, Datadog
Other
Back-end, Computer Science, Mathematics, Cloud, APIs, Architecture, Full-stack, Project Leadership, Technical Leadership, Data Architecture, RESTful Services, API Design, CI/CD Pipelines, Healthcare Software, Leadership, Finance, Networking, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Startups, High-tech Startups, Data Warehousing, Data Engineering, Data Warehouse Design, Algorithms, Fivetran, Graphs, Data Science, Health Insurance, Healthcare & Insurance
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