Kaspar Schiess

Bern, Switzerland

Member since November 28, 2016

Kaspar has more than 10 years of experience working with various technologies on both web and on mobile platforms. As a generalist, he picks up new technologies quickly and has a knack of finding and repairing bugs in existing systems. His specialties among technologies are Ruby and Rust. People are always first for Kaspar, software comes second. He is completely dependable, remains calm under stressful circumstances, and gets the job done.

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Portfolio

Technology Astronauts GmbH
Ruby, Rust, PostgreSQL
Geographic Institute (University of Zürich)
Ruby, Postgres, ZFS, KVM, Linux, Solaris, Terminal Services
Various Positions
C++, C# .NET, Various Databases, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Windows, Linux, Mac

Experience

C, 17 years
JavaScript, 17 years
Object-oriented Design (OOD), 16 years
POSIX, 13 years
Ruby, 11 years
SQL, 10 years
PostgreSQL, 6 years
Rust, 2 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Ruby, Rust, PostgreSQL, Unix

The most amazing...

...project I've worked on is a back-end API that summarizes several seasons worth of Unihockey player data in real time for the web.

Employment

Consultant, Software Developer, CEO
Technology Astronauts GmbH
2012 - PRESENT
- Created an interface between FleetBoard and Salesforce for a large logistics company. Trucks in the field receive work orders as part of a manipulation that the back-office starts in Salesforce. Once completed, results flow back into Salesforce and allow for up to date reports on the company.
- Created an API to a database containing several years of unihockey player and play data. The API provides almost real-time access to summaries and statistics. An inflow of data triggers hooks, which in turn, trigger re-computation of statistics within only a few seconds of the original event. This way, tables of results stay up to date while still allowing for frequent page impressions during matches.
- Created a platform for social storage of bookmarks called 'refind.com'. This platform has an invitation system for ramping up users, crawls webpages, and executes JavaScript on every page in a sandbox. It also creates screenshots of the crawled pages available via a content addressable storage and CDN.
- Created and maintained several open source projects such as 'parslet' (Ruby) or 'bocuse' (Ruby). Parslet is a parser generator library that allows for writing parsers quickly. My focus was on legibility of error messages when the parse fails.
- Deployed software and microservices on server infrastructure, including storage and redundancy. Services deployed here include PostgresSQL HA, HAProxy, Linux Pacemaker + Heartbeat, and iSCSI ZFS ZVOLs.
Technologies: Ruby, Rust, PostgreSQL
Pragmatic Programmer/ DevOp
Geographic Institute (University of Zürich)
2009 - 2012
- Automated central administrative tasks with a self-service interface for the clients.
- Created an inventory of existing VMs, and worked on the migration of VM services to KVM, and subsequently to Windows Hyper-V.
- Provided 2nd level support for domain specific applications, as well as direct technical support for end users.
- Created several small tools to aid and automate the administration of the department's IT services, used in around 120 locations and responsible for around 30 TB of data.
- Worked on the planning and building of a data center for the department, managing and reconstructing existing machines, managing heat flow, and configuring UPSs.
Technologies: Ruby, Postgres, ZFS, KVM, Linux, Solaris, Terminal Services
Programmer / Analyst
Various Positions
1998 - 2009
- Worked on the creation of one of the first content management systems for enterprise use, all in C++, called 'Obtree'. Supported several database systems and web servers and had a GUI system for templating and publishing.
- Created a motorcycle ad platform web application in C# .NET in the spirit of www.autoscout24.com. Included a domain specific search and a workflow for publishing ads.
- Worked on cryptographic licensing and data exchange for bank tariffs in Java.
- Developed several web platforms for clients in tourism and other industries. Platforms mostly published data to the web and had their own authoring solution connected to our clients internal systems.
- Created a streaming server for a music platform, capable of streaming music videos to many clients 24/7. This project included an authoring platform for creation of music programs and OpenGL based video compositing.
Technologies: C++, C# .NET, Various Databases, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Windows, Linux, Mac

Experience

Refind: Social Bookmarking (Development)
https://refind.com
As part of a team of three, I helped create refind.com, a social bookmarking service in the spirit of delicious.com. It includes web page crawling, fast and flexible display to many devices, an iOS and Android app, and mechanisms to synchronize with twitter and recruit new members via invitations.

Skills

Languages
Ruby, JavaScript, Java, C, Smalltalk, Assembler, VHDL, HTML, CoffeeScript, SQL, JRuby, C#, Rust, Lisp, CSS, C++, Swift, Ada, Visual Basic, Apex, Sass, PHP, Python
Frameworks
Sinatra, UIkit, Bootstrap, Apache Thrift, Cocoa, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Slim, DTrace, .NET
Libraries/APIs
jQuery, Protobuf, POSIX, CocoaPods
Tools
Puppet, Turbo Pascal, Chef
Paradigms
Test-driven Development (TDD), Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Object-oriented Design (OOD)
Storage
PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, MySQL, MongoDB, JSON, Microsoft SQL Server
Platforms
Mac OS, Linux, iOS, Android, Solaris, OmniOS, Illumos, Oracle
Other
Functional Design, BSON, AOMQ

Education

Master's degree in Computer Science
École Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) - Lausanne, Switzerland
2000 - 2006

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