Kenneth Kalmer
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Kenneth is passionate about solving problems, especially in an elegant and sustainable manner. He loves learning about anything, especially things that make his better at his craft. He has been up and down the web stack for the last 20 years, and does not seeing himself stopping anytime soon.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Git, Spacemacs, OS X
The most amazing...
...thing I've coded is a tool for reusing front-end JavaScript with V8 in a Ruby system to produce stunning PDFs from the same JavaScript calculations.
Work Experience
CTO
ValuationUp.com
- Built a powerful dashboard powered by Backbone.js allowing users to explore various facets of their management accounts.
- Created powerful visualizations using D3 to help clients understand various ratios, performance indicators, and other useful information hidden away in the management accounts.
- Built a collection of complex financial models in JavaScript to allow for instant feedback as users manipulate their management accounts in the system, including valuations of their businesses.
- Reused the front-end JavaScript on the server side with V8 to generate stunning PDF reports without duplicating a single line of code on Ruby.
- Drove PhantomJS as a service remotely to rasterize SVG images for inclusion in server-side generated PDF reports.
- Built a searchable version of the NAICS database, powered by Elasticsearch, to help users quickly choose an accurate industry for their businesses.
CTO
iSign.pro
- Refactored and improved document management capabilities of the system, allowing users to easily upload, download, share, and categorize their documents.
- Refactored and improved the online document signing capabilities of the system, allowing documents to be signed on touch devices as well as laptops/PC's.
- Built many iterations of the front-end pages to help market the service to visitors.
- Built lots of reliable back-end worker processes to handle complex document conversion and signing tasks for users.
- Improved performance of the application in several key areas, including using CDN's to speed up static content and optimizing server processes for faster execution.
CTO
Internet Exchange
- Built all the dashboards, portals, and management systems for a wholesale ISP, including billing and provisioning systems.
- Built a hybrid private cloud solution on Xen to deliver typical ISP services at scale: email, DNS, shared hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, firewalls, routing, and storage. Extended beyond the cloud with certain components running on EC2.
- Implemented deep integrations with various components of the infrastructure to allow for 24x7 provisioning of email, DNS, and shared hosting. Integrated most provisioning with Chef and Chef Solo wherever possible.
- Implemented deep integration with numerous, desperately different, third-party APIs for provisioning broadband services and domain registrations. Pioneered the APIs with the service providers.
- Built tons of data collecting, auditing, and reporting features into the system to defend the company from ignorant clients and extortionist suppliers.
Experience
Interview on Ruby Rogues Episode 122
ValuationUp.com
iSign.pro
MTN Directory Services
Reusing your frontend JS on the server with The Ruby Racer and/or Ruby Rhino
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDgtVhN8EcwPowerDNS on Rails
https://github.com/kennethkalmer/powerdns-on-railsdaemon-kit
https://github.com/kennethkalmer/daemon-kitSkills
Languages
Ruby, JavaScript, Clojure, HTML5, CoffeeScript, CSS, CSS3, Go, Sass, HTML, SCSS
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), ClojureScript, Bootstrap, Sinatra, Bootstrap 3, Capybara, Ember.js, PhoneGap, Jasmine
Tools
RSpec, Cucumber, Git, GitHub, Capistrano, Campfire, Pivotal Tracker, Postfix, V8, Spacemacs, MacVim, Chef
Libraries/APIs
Backbone.js, jQuery, Underscore.js, Modernizr, AMQP, Resque, ImageMagick, Prawn, PhantomJS, D3.js, Nokogiri, Handlebars, Devise, EventMachine, Paperclip
Paradigms
Test-driven Development (TDD), Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Responsive Web Design (RWD), REST
Storage
MySQL, Elasticsearch, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), PostgreSQL, Memcached, Redis, MongoDB, CouchDB
Other
Datomic, Ajax, XMPP, Courier, IMAP, DNS, GitFlow
Platforms
Xen, Amazon EC2, Heroku, OS X, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
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