Joshua Ballanco

Joshua Ballanco

Coral Gables, United States
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Joshua Ballanco

Joshua Ballanco

Coral Gables, United States
Member since November 22, 2013
Joshua is an architect, engineer, and scientist with experience building large-scale systems dealing with everything from massive amounts of video data to heavy web traffic to integration with a wide array of components in an SOA infrastructure. He's worked for Apple and AOL, and also led a group of 20+ consultants.
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Portfolio
Experience
  • C, 12 years
  • Objective-C, 12 years
  • Ruby, 10 years
  • Ruby on Rails (RoR), 9 years
  • Distributed Programming, 8 years
  • RubyMotion, 6 years
  • Agile Software Development, 5 years
  • Clojure, 3 years
Coral Gables, United States
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
OS X, Linux, Vim, Emacs, Xcode, Git, Mercurial
The most amazing...
...bug I've fixed required taking a system that couldn't even handle two machines and scaling it to over twenty in less than four weeks before shipping.
Employment
  • Software Engineer - RoR
    Centzy (via Toptal)
    2014 - 2014
    • Extended a CMS-like system to host FAQ content.
    • Updated HTML + CSS for various static pages.
    • Implemented a dynamically resizing button menu.
    • Updated responsive design elements for mobile browsers.
    • Fixed a variety of minor bugs in a legacy Rails codebase.
    Technologies: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, CSS, Clojure
  • Chief Scientist
    Burnside Digital
    2011 - 2013
    • Developed client infrastructures using various components of Amazon Web Services.
    • Worked with teams at RedHat to build solutions on the JVM and JBoss platforms.
    • Developed components of an SOA infrastructure that supports a variety of client projects, including the CityEats platform we developed for Scripps Network Interactive.
    • Presented technical solutions at software conferences around the world.
    • Helped introduce and develop new technologies with our team of 20+ software engineers.
    Technologies: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Objective-C, Clojure, Java, Chef
  • Support Engineer
    Exceptional
    2011 - 2011
    • Fixed bugs reported on the main Exceptional.io app.
    • Responded to support requests from Exceptional customers.
    • Developed integration between Exceptional and Pivotal Tracker.
    • Monitored servers for service interruptions and helped to diagnose, troubleshoot, and fix emerging issues.
    • Assisted with transitioning the technology stack to new owners.
    Technologies: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Memcache, Redis, Amazon SQS/SNS
  • Back-end Software Engineer
    AOL
    2010 - 2011
    • Migrated the primary CMS application from Ruby Enterprise Edition to Ruby 1.9.2.
    • Optimized database performance and helped maintain consistent page load times across an order of magnitude increase in traffic.
    • Scaled the platform from less than 100 locations to over 800 in less than 3 months.
    • Designed a service-oriented architecture overhaul of the entire publishing platform.
    • Participated in a company-wide effort to embrace open source and encourage participation in the open source community by employees in all departments.
    Technologies: Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Mongo, Redis, JavaScript
  • Server Software Engineer
    Apple
    2006 - 2010
    • Developed a Grand Central Dispatch based web server for MacRuby called ControlTower.
    • Upgraded the product for two major Rails revisions and one Ruby version.
    • Managed the QA process for the team’s deliverables.
    • Implemented a web interface, including a near real-time video preview system implemented with only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
    • Improved server and database performance from less-than-acceptable to ready-to-release.
    Technologies: OS X Server, Ruby on Rails, Objective-C, C, Quicktime, Quartz Composer, Xsan
Experience
  • CityEats (Development)

    CityEats was a platform for customers to make reservations at popular restaurants, and also for restaurants to manage availability and offer special reservations for promotional events. With Burnside Digital, I assisted in maintenance and the development of new features. I also led a team that re-implemented the integration between the customer-facing site and the reservation management back-end utilized by restaurants using a service-oriented architecture.

  • ControlTower (Development)
    https://github.com/MacRuby/ControlTower

    ControlTower is an HTTP application server for MacRuby. As a member of the OS X Server team at Apple, I developed ControlTower to meet the needs of a larger project, as there were no existing application servers at the time that worked with MacRuby and met all of the project requirements.

  • Evolver (Development)
    https://github.com/jballanc/Evolver

    Evolver is a "toy simulation" of an evolutionary system that I implemented as part of my doctoral thesis research in the field of evolutionary biology. Utilizing Ruby, it allows for all of the important parameters of the simulation to be specified via configuration file, while still running fast enough to complete simulations in a reasonable amount of time.

  • Y-Combinator for Objective-C (Development)
    https://github.com/jballanc/objc-ycomb

    In the process of studying both Objective-C and the various fixed-point combinators from the lambda calculus, I conceived of a way to utilize Objective-C's blocks to implement the Y-combinator. This is more of a fun, exploratory project than something intended for production use (though there's no reason it shouldn't work in a production system).

  • Learning Swift Programming: Is it Ready for Prime Time? (Publication)
    https://www.toptal.com/swift/swift-is-it-ready-for-prime-time
    Since Apple's launch of Swift this past June, many iOS developers have been struggling with the question of if, how, and when to transition from Objective-C to Swift. This article explores some important points to consider before jumping into Swift development.
Skills
  • Languages
    C, Ruby, Clojure, Java, Objective-C, C++, Lua, JavaScript, Python
  • Frameworks
    Sinatra, Cocoa, RubyMotion, Ruby on Rails (RoR), AngularJS, Django
  • Libraries/APIs
    Compojure, Rack, jQuery, Nokogiri, Twitter API
  • Tools
    GitHub Pages, Vim Text Editor, MacVim, JIRA, GitHub, TextMate, Emacs, Bitbucket, GitLab
  • Paradigms
    Agile Software Development, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Distributed Programming, Kanban, Scrum, Functional Programming, Logic programming
  • Platforms
    Mac OS X, FreeBSD, iOS, Linux, JBoss
  • Storage
    SQLite, Memcached, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB
  • Misc
    UI Kit
Education
  • Doctorate degree in Computational Evolutionary Biology
    Stevens Institute of Technology - New Jersey
    2008 - 2011
  • Master's degree in Chemical Biology
    Stevens Institute of Techonolgy - New Jersey
    2005 - 2008
  • Bachelor's degree in Chemistry
    Stevens Institute of Technology - New Jersey
    1998 - 2002
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