Jacob Mortensen, Developer in Anchorage, AK, United States
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Jacob Mortensen

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Location
Anchorage, AK, United States
Toptal Member Since
December 1, 2015

Jacob has spent 6+ years as a full-stack developer working mostly for small startups (<10 people), which he enjoyed because of the level of impact he could have and the ownership of what he worked on. Recently engaged in writing JavaScript, it has become a joy for him to work on both server and client. He loves building MVPs or adding functionality to existing codebases.

jQueryRuby on Rails (RoR)Node.jsFacebook APIAngularJSPostgreSQLJavaRubyMongoDBReactAndroidBackbone.jsRedisRubyMineGitJSTL

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Git, RubyMine, Atom

The most amazing...

...thing I've accomplished in code has been speeding up image processing 20x at Memoir.

Work Experience

Software Consultant

2015 - 2016
Stride NYC
  • Freelance at NBC Universal with internal tools team to split up a monolithic application into microservices.
Technologies: Angular, Node.js

Lead Developer (freelance)

2015 - 2015
Mayday.is
  • Rebuilt the Nescafe.com website.
Technologies: Backbone.js

Lead Developer (freelance)

2015 - 2015
Happy Fun Corp
  • Led the development of mic.com/marriott­travel­quiz.
  • Developed the Brooklyn Museum port of their iOS app to Android.
Technologies: Backbone.js

Software Developer

2014 - 2015
Memoir
  • Increased the number of new users by building web signup flow with ability to connect: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Swarm, and Dropbox.
  • Grew engagement via an intricate email product with individualized metrics which a large percent of daily actives started using.
  • Optimized a 20x speed increase to sharpen and create thumbnails for hundreds of millions of photos.
  • Led the transition of the front-end from Rails to a new AngularJS stack as a separate service.
Technologies: MongoDB, Node.js, AngularJS, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Software Developer

2013 - 2014
Adknowledge
  • Created an Android SDK for showing a custom interstitial ad in third-party Android apps.
  • Made ad layouts more responsive resulting in increased tablet CTR of ~2.5%.
  • Increased CPM ROI by creating a framework for scraping ad bids from third party advertiser networks to keep our bids competitive.
Technologies: JavaScript, Ruby, Android SDK

Software Developer

2011 - 2013
Socialweekend (acquired by Adknowledge)
  • Ported iOS Birthdays+ application to Android.
  • Built from 0 to 37+ million uniques as primary engineer of a suite of Facebook apps. The same code powers 300+ different apps in 14 languages.
  • Developed code for a queueing system which increased the scalability of wall-post delivery.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Facebook API, Android, JavaScript, Django

Software Engineer

2010 - 2011
Become, Inc.
  • Localized core business, client facing, billing, and bidding web management platform for Japan.
  • Added features to advertising reports: date range options, export to CSV, sort by column.
  • Implemented SEO-targeted enhancements and layout tweaks across many domains.
  • Selected to work onsite in Japan and Germany for localization efforts.
Technologies: jQuery, YUI, JavaScript, SQL, JSTL, XSLT, Spring, Java

HueWear

https://github.com/ubien/HueWear
Control Hue lights from Android Wear.

Poker Bot

Dynamic AI adjusts to each player by storing hand histories in PokerTracker DB (w ww.pokertracker.com/). Monte Carlo simulations determine hand strength. Optimizations to open source software OpenHoldem (code.google.com/p/openholdembot/) took the initial version from playing four games to nine or more games simultaneously. Small winner of over 300k+ hands of real money in online poker.

StenoSpeak for Android

Turn typed stenography into spoken words in real time. Built during NYU ABILITY Technology Hackathon and won 2nd place.

Forex Mapper

https://github.com/ubien/forexpayment
Plots real-time foreign exchange data and pulls sentiment analysis from PsychSignal. Built during FinTech Hackathon 2013 where I was also first to crack the Dwolla challenge. (http://blog.dwolla.com/dwolla­challenges­fintech­hackathon­2013/) .

Demoqeue App

A website for searching and voting for songs and displaying the current song queue. The song with the highest vote gets played next on the Android app.

StreetCleanPark

https://github.com/ubien/StreetCleanPark
Avoid street cleaning parking tickets in San Francisco https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=porqueno.streetcleanpark
2003 - 2008

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

Iowa State University - Ames, Iowa

Libraries/APIs

Node.js, jQuery, Facebook API, JSTL, YUI, RequireJS, React, Backbone.js, Underscore.js, PhantomJS

Tools

Atom, RubyMine, Git, Gulp, Karma, Browserify, Babel, Grunt, Mocha, Webpack

Frameworks

AngularJS, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Android SDK, Django, Spring, Angular

Languages

JavaScript, XSLT, SQL, Java, Ruby

Platforms

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Android

Storage

Redis, Memcached, PostgreSQL, MongoDB

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