Dan Rasband, Developer in Salt Lake City, UT, United States
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Dan Rasband

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Ruby on Rails Developer

Location
Salt Lake City, UT, United States
Toptal Member Since
September 6, 2016

Dan has a master's degree in linguistics, but has been working as a programmer for the last 7 years. He started his development career in PHP and Drupal, and now has worked with Ruby, C#, JavaScript, Swift, Objective-C, and other languages. He has experience with many AWS technologies and has designed multiple highly-secure web software architectures.

Drupal 7Amazon Web Services (AWS)RubyAmazon S3 (AWS S3)Amazon EC2Ruby on Rails (RoR)CoffeeScriptMongoDBPHPGoogle AnalyticsMySQLSQLUbuntuSQLiteGoogle Analytics API

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Terminal, Chrome, Sublime Text, Git, OS X

The most amazing...

...project I have worked on recently is a retirement modeling tool for financial advisers, involving a variety of complex financial algorithms.

Work Experience

Development Team Lead

2012 - PRESENT
Objective
  • Architected and implemented an n-tier, highly-secure ASP.NET application in AWS.
  • Led development of a Ruby on Rails HRIS application over multiple years.
  • Developed and led the development of multiple Drupal applications that required a variety of custom modules.
  • Developed multiple proprietary financial modeling calculators.
  • Led the development of an enterprise B2B application using Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, and Redis for the back-end, and AngularJS for the front-end.
  • Led a team of 10 developers in producing clean, maintainable, well-tested code on a variety of projects over multiple years.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), PostgREST, ECMAScript (ES6), CoffeeScript, JavaScript, Redis, MySQL, Swift, C#, PHP, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Technical Writer

2015 - 2015
Launch School (formerly Tea Leaf Academy)
  • Wrote several technical blog articles.
  • Wrote the "Introduction to the Command Line" online book.
Technologies: NGINX, Ruby, Jekyll

Senior Developer

2010 - 2012
WebChuck Web
  • Developed over 50 custom Drupal modules.
  • Single-handedly built a turn-key solution for Drupal applications.
  • Built a custom SSO integration Drupal module for an enterprise finance firm.
  • Built a custom, multi-site eCommerce Drupal application.
  • Handled DevOps of over 70 Drupal applications in a Drupal multi-site environment.
Technologies: JavaScript, PHP, Drupal

Developer

2009 - 2010
Starr Tech Interactive (now part of Anthology Group)
  • Helped build and maintain multiple high-traffic Drupal sites.
  • Developed a single-page app with a Drupal back-end, using Drupal views and a custom JavaScript front-end.
  • Developed custom PHP forms and minimal PHP applications.
Technologies: Linux, JavaScript, Drupal, PHP

Built for Teams

https://www.builtforteams.com
For the last 3 years, I have been acting as the lead developer for the Built for Teams' application.

This application is built with Ruby on Rails, Backbone.js, Redis, and MySQL on AWS; it is tested continuously using RSpec and Capybara on Codeship. The app also uses AWS's S3, EC2, KMS, CloudFront, and others.

Last Advisor

Last Advisor is a retirement planning modeling solution for financial advisers.

I have helped maintain and improve this software for the several past years, and have more recently been tasked with rewriting, improving, and inventing new algorithms for the software.

Rizolv

Rizolv is a web-based software system that handles customer complaints for title companies.

Because much of the information provided by customers could potentially contain personally identifiable information, much of the data had to be encrypted at rest and in transit. The client also required that the application be written in ASP.NET so a teammate and I learned ASP.NET and C#, architected the n-tier architecture, implemented hardware encryption, and deployed the site to production—all in a little over 6 months.

Languages

JavaScript, Ruby, CoffeeScript, PHP, ECMAScript (ES6), SQL, TypeScript, C#, Swift, Python, Go, Bash

Frameworks

GrapesJS, Ruby on Rails (RoR), ASP.NET, AngularJS, Redux, Chrome, Django, Knockout (Knockout.js), JSON Web Tokens (JWT)

Libraries/APIs

Square API, Rolify, Google Analytics API, AES, Backbone.js, Redis Queue, Devise, Moment.js, React, PostgREST

Platforms

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon EC2, Drupal 7, Ubuntu, OS X, Drupal, Linux, Heroku, CentOS, iOS

Storage

Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, SQLite, SQL Server 2012, PostgreSQL

Other

Single-page Applications (SPA), CanCan, Encryption, SSL Certificates, Ruby Gems, IIS

Tools

Google Analytics, NGINX, Apache, AWS CloudFormation, Codeship, Amazon CloudFront CDN, AWS SDK, AWS ELB, Git, Sublime Text, Terminal, Jekyll, Xero, AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Webpack

Paradigms

DevOps, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD)

2008 - 2010

Master's Degree in Linguistics

University of Hawaii at Manoa - Honolulu, Hawaii (USA)

2003 - 2008

Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics & Korean (Double Major)

Brigham Young University - Provo, Utah (USA)