Joshua Ballanco - Freelance Ruby on Rails Developer for Hire

Software Engineer - RoR

2014 - 2014

Centzy (via Toptal)

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

2011 - 2013

Burnside Digital

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

2011 - 2011

Exceptional

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

2010 - 2011

AOL

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

2006 - 2010

Apple

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

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.

Languages

C, Ruby, Java, Clojure, Objective-C, JavaScript, C++, Lua, Python

Frameworks

Sinatra, RubyMotion, Cocoa, Ruby on Rails (RoR), AngularJS, Django

Libraries/APIs

Rack, Compojure, Nokogiri, jQuery, Twitter API

Tools

GitHub Pages, GitHub, JIRA, MacVim, Vim Text Editor, Emacs, BitBucket, GitLab, TextMate

Paradigms

Agile Software Development, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Kanban, Functional Programming, Distributed Programming, Scrum, Logic programming

Platforms

Mac OS, FreeBSD, Linux, iOS, JBoss

Storage

SQLite, Memcached, Redis, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB

Doctorate degree in Computational Evolutionary Biology

2008 - 2011

Stevens Institute of Technology - New Jersey

Master's degree in Chemical Biology

2005 - 2008

Stevens Institute of Techonolgy - New Jersey

Bachelor's degree in Chemistry

1998 - 2002

Stevens Institute of Technology - New Jersey