Jon Rowe, Developer in Southampton, United Kingdom
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Jon Rowe

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Back-end Developer

Southampton, United Kingdom

Toptal member since October 6, 2022

Bio

Jon is an experienced Elixir and Ruby developer with around 15 years of commercial experience. He has been working primarily in Elixir (with some Ruby) for the last five years and was a Rails developer before that. Jon considers himself to specialise in test driven development and is a current maintainer of RSpec. He has built a lot of apps from the ground up and helped improve code quality on existing apps, everything from performant data-warehouses to large eCommerce sites.

Portfolio

Freelance Clients
Elixir, Functional Programming, Phoenix LiveView, PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS3...

Experience

  • Test-driven Development (TDD) - 15 years
  • PostgreSQL - 15 years
  • Ruby - 15 years
  • Concurrent Programming - 15 years
  • RSpec - 15 years
  • Elixir - 6 years
  • Phoenix - 5 years
  • Phoenix LiveView - 2 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

MacOS, Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL

The most amazing...

...team I've worked with delivered the rewrite of the second largest car marketplace in the US into Elixir, increasing performance and decreasing user wait times.

Work Experience

Senior Consulting Elixir Engineer

2012 - PRESENT
Freelance Clients
  • Worked closely with founders to produce MVPs for early-stage customers and investors. Demoed products to secure funding to build more extended-term teams.
  • Provided extra development support to existing teams to help meet deadlines under pressure. Involved ramping up quickly and being productive without draining the current team and preventing them from missing key business or regulatory deadlines.
  • Maintained and upgraded projects to keep them secure and performant years after their initial development. Provided long term stability to the customers expanding the project life by another three years.
  • Increased performance by analyzing database operations and refactoring to remove bottlenecks, and add aggregates resulting in a ten times performance gain (500ms to sub 50ms response times) for a large data warehouse.
Technologies: Elixir, Functional Programming, Phoenix LiveView, PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS3, REST APIs, CSS, Back-end, Git, Web Development, Full-stack, Amazon Web Services (AWS), CI/CD Pipelines, Docker, JavaScript, REST, Tailwind CSS, Fly.io, Elm, RSpec, Distributed Systems, Message Queues, Pub/Sub, Email Marketing, Email Marketing Automation, Architecture

Flowerwork.io (Contract)

Worked closely with the founder on building an MVP to demonstrate the Flowerwork continuous preview environment to investors and early stage customers. I completed a UI overhaul in live view with integration into the deployment platform (Kubernetes).

Forward/GetThru.io

Provided extra development support to launch critical features to comply with regulatory changes around “ten digit number codes” in the US. GetThru is a political campaign/advocacy call/messaging platform.

Mortgage Broker Tools

Expanded the existing Rails app with an Elixir backed API for GraphQL. I set up subscriptions to provide real time updates to the search UI and put together new functionality to deal with the expanding feature set.


Erlang Solutions/Cars.com

Consulted with the cars.com customer team and built their back end, Salesforce, and billing integrations. I migrated data from their previous environment and improved the organization of the database structure.
2003 - 2008

Master’s Degree in Software Engineering

Sheffield University - Sheffield, UK

Libraries/APIs

REST APIs, OpenGL

Tools

RSpec, Git

Languages

Elixir, Ruby, HTML, GraphQL, CSS, JavaScript, Elm, CSS3, Java, C++, Objective-C

Frameworks

Phoenix, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Tailwind CSS

Paradigms

Concurrent Programming, Agile Software Development, Test-driven Development (TDD), REST, Functional Programming, Kanban

Platforms

MacOS, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Salesforce, Kubernetes, Docker

Storage

PostgreSQL

Other

Phoenix LiveView, Back-end, Web Development, Full-stack, Pub/Sub, Architecture, CI/CD Pipelines, Fly.io, Distributed Systems, Message Queues, Email Marketing, Email Marketing Automation

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