Senior Software Engineer
2018 - 2019Prodigy Finance- Oversaw the architecture and development of an OAuth OpenID Connect provider, streamlining user authorization to various Prodigy services.
- Helped other teams integrate OpenID in their apps.
- Worked with Capital Markets and built tools modeling cash flows and liabilities of warehouse facilities to enable investors to track the progress of different investment vehicles.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, AWS, Docker, OAuth, Open API, PythonCTO
2014 - 2017Stagelink- Developed a tool indexing more than 30 million unique YouTube channels on a weekly basis, using a mix of API access and scraping.
- Rebuilt a legacy jQuery front end in React from scratch for both Stagelink customer-facing products; moved away from a monolithic Rails app towards API-based services.
- Implemented and optimized a show-attendance prediction algorithm designed by the company's CEO. Deployed the new code to production—increasing prediction accuracy by 15% and increasing the speed of calculation three-fold.
- Hired and led a team of six developers—performing code reviews and training sessions, having one-on-one meetings every two weeks, and mentoring junior developers.
- Designed a voting fraud detection system that analyzed tens of thousands of votes per day to identify fake users, multiple votes by the same person, and other abuses.
- Implemented an extensible payment back-end which interfaced with multiple payment providers including PAYMILL, Stripe, PayPal, SOFORT, and Wirecard.
Technologies: Ruby on Rail, JavaScript, React, Ruby, Redux, Elasticsearch, AWS, PostgreSQLTechnical Founder
2013 - 2013Stealth-Mode Startup- Built a C2C apartment rental website with deep integration with the Facebook API—including a Facebook login, automated posts to user timelines and groups, notifications, user-to-user messaging, advertising, and more.
- Developed a bot for automatically posting apartment rental offers into Facebook groups.
- Created an MVP of a B2B recommendation and reference product using jQuery, Rails, and PostgreSQL.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, jQuery, PostgreSQL, Facebook APISoftware Engineer
2012 - 2013Digital Polsat- Developed a search engine for a music-streaming platform consisting of more than 15 million songs. The search engine was based on Elasticsearch and MongoDB and was deployed to a cluster of EC2 servers.
- Finetuned a search engine configuration based on artist popularity and measurements of hit/miss ratio for presented results.
- Exposed the search engine to mobile, web, and desktop applications by building a JSON-based API service in Rails.
- Implemented a recommendation service based on user preferences, content team picks, etc.
- Developed a caching-layer based on Memcached (for in-app caching) and Varnish (for page and endpoint-level caching).
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWSFull-stack Developer
2010 - 2011LiveChat- Integrated LiveChat with various third-party applications including Zendesk, Salesforce, Highrise, and Zoho to pull customer data into a chat window.
- Built an outside-facing REST API, wrote docs and sample code, helped outside developers integrate with it, and troubleshot issues.
- Created chat plugins for popular eCommerce solutions (Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and the like).
- Developed a wizard allowing LiveChat clients to customize their chat experiences for their users by changing the color scheme for the chat window, adding pre-chat questions, and a post-chat survey.
- Built an API for an internal dashboard showing sales and usage statistics.
Technologies: PHP, jQuery, MySQL, RESTful APISoftware Developer
2009 - 2010CCIG- Designed and implemented a quality assurance application—including a dynamic survey generator and HTML5 audio player. I also developed a back-end service that selected a random sample from a pool of all sales calls recorded on a previous day.
- Wrote, specified, designed, and developed an applicant-tracking system according to HR department requirements.
- Migrated the internal apps from a legacy homegrown PHP framework to Symfony.
Technologies: PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, MySQL
Mike Szyndel
Software Developer in Berlin, Germany
Member since January 22, 2017
Mike is a seasoned full-stack developer and software architect with in-depth knowledge of Node.js, Ruby on Rails, and React. He has a unique ability of understanding and translating business requirements into development roadmaps. In his previous roles as a team lead and CTO, he has developed strong project management and communication skills.
Mike is now available for hire
Portfolio
- Prodigy FinanceRuby on Rails, AWS, Docker, OAuth, Open API, Python
- StagelinkRuby on Rail, JavaScript, React, Ruby, Redux, Elasticsearch, AWS, PostgreSQL
- Stealth-Mode StartupRuby on Rails, jQuery, PostgreSQL, Facebook API
Experience
- JavaScript, 8 years
- PostgreSQL, 8 years
- Elasticsearch, 7 years
- Ruby on Rails (RoR), 6 years
- Ruby, 6 years
- React, 2 years
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
macOS, Atom
The most amazing...
...thing I've built was a distributed scraper which continuously indexed all YouTube channels.
Employment
Experience
- Stack Overflow (Other amazing things)https://stackoverflow.com/users/2422778/mike-szyndel
With over 250 answers and more than 8,600 points, I'm in the top 5% of Stack Overflow users overall.
- Stagelink (Development)https://stagelink.com
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 Gem (Development)https://github.com/hajder/pipedrive-ruby
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.
Skills
Languages
CSS3, Sass, Haml, HTML5, CSS, HTML, ECMAScript (ES6), ES5, JavaScript, RubyFrameworks
Express.js, Redux, Bootstrap, Ruby on Rails 4, Ruby on Rails 5, minitest, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ember.js, React NativeLibraries/APIs
Stripe, ActiveRecord, REST APIs, Sidekiq, Stripe API, Stripe Connect, Node.js, Twilio API, jQuery, PayPal API, React, Facebook Open Graph API, Facebook API, YouTube API, Slack API, AWS EC2 APITools
Slack, Git, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Jira, GitHub, RSpec, SOFORT, Wirecard, PAYMILL, Asana, G Suite, Trello, Atlassian Confluence, Docker Compose, AWS EBS, Redux ThunkParadigms
MVC Design, REST, Continuous Delivery (CD), Management, Back-end Architecture, Agile Software Development, Test-driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI), Requirements Analysis, Scrum, Agile, HIPAA CompliancePlatforms
Heroku, MacOS, Linux, AWS EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, TwilioStorage
AWS RDS, Memcached, PostgreSQL, AWS S3, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, ElasticsearchOther
BrainTree, Full-stack, Infrastructure, Payment Gateways, Quality Assurance (QA), QA Leadership, QA Automation, Software QA, Software Architecture, APIs, CSV File Processing, Web Development, Mobile Back-end, Back-end Development, Back-end Performance, Back-end, RESTful Services, RESTful APIs, RESTful Web Services, Ruby Gems, High Code Quality, CTO, Business Requirements, Web Developer, Requirements & Specifications, Stripe Payments, Leadership, Team Leadership, Serverless
Education
- Master of Science degree in Computer Science2006 - 2011Wrocław University of Science and Technology - Wrocław, Poland
