Mike Szyndel

With over 250 answers and more than 8,600 points, I'm in the top 5% of Stack Overflow users overall.

Being the CTO, I was responsible for all sorts of things at Stagelink. In the day-to-day work, I was coding and managing a team, occasionally jumping into server and AWS administration, developing product roadmaps and writing specifications, performing code reviews and one-on-ones with developers, negotiating with designers, and so on.

The things that I'm most proud of:
• We went through two major redesigns of the website while improving usability, performance, the looks, and user satisfaction.
• I successfully moved away from the monolithic Rails app towards an API—cleanly separating the front-end from back-end with some background services performing the heavy lifting (like emails, and so on).
• I made the right technical decisions by separating different parts of the product codebase and making them communicate via an API. This saved us from many headaches when scaling-up.
• I helped new developers quickly get proficient with Stagelink's code and systems—to decrease the bus factor.

Pipedrive is a type of CRM software, and we used it a lot at Stagelink to track our sales efforts. Based on the YouTube scraping results, we were sending cold emails to matching artists and tracked the progress in Pipedrive.

We started to use a gem to make our lives easier, but the code was pretty terrible. In my free time, I started refactoring it and bringing the quality (and code coverage) up a bit—we are planning to release a new version at some point.

Work Done:
• Removed recursion from the paging-handling code.
• Moved the HTTP calls out of the data objects.
• Performed general cleanup of the code.
• Updated the dependencies and made it work with the current Ruby versions.