
Paul Keen
Verified Expert in Engineering
CTO Developer
Paul is a personal consultant with 15+ years of experience in full-stack software development. He architects solutions that are easy to support and scale, implementing best coding and management practices by continuously improving technical approaches. He focuses on test-driven development and is a Kanban practitioner.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Kanban, GitHub, Test-driven Development (TDD), JavaScript, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Team Leadership, Leadership, Ruby, Continuous Delivery (CD), Agile DevOps, Go
The most amazing...
...experience was as a top 100 Ruby on Rails contributor where I helped numerous open-source projects like Ruby on Rails (Top100), Bundler, and more.
Work Experience
Fractional CTO
OrchestrateCS
- Launched the first version of the application, within the first 4 months of operations, so the sales and marketing teams were able to use it right away.
- Led the distribution efforts across worldwide teams, for the task development process.
- Automated the delivery process and set up quick feedback for developers.
CTO, Founder
JetThoughts
- Build 5+ R&D for product companies in Ukraine, with 20+ developers per each.
- Provided technical consultations to the clients, building a successful strategy, effectively structuring teams and processes.
- Delivered scalable web and mobile applications using Ruby on Rails and modern JavaScript frameworks (Node.js, React, Vue.js, AngularJS).
- Developed a framework for simple collaboration to reduce waste in product development. Clients distinguish communication approaches as a critical factor for mutually beneficial cooperation.
- Designed code practices to help the team deliver a stable product. It improves team effectiveness and guarantees the quality and scalability of provided solutions.
- Built strong partnerships with clients like Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (Top 3 University of Russian Federation), DefMethod, Knight Foundation, and others.
- Set up a process to onboard, mentor, and train developers to help them to work as influential team members on the client's projects.
React Native Developer
Gilad Novik (via Toptal)
- Upgraded old React Native application to use last React Native 0.61 and React Native Navigation from 1.x to 4.x.
- Researched the legacy code and refactored it to upgrade not-supported dependencies.
- Onboarded testing for the legacy code. Enabled it to allow to check integrations on different devices.
CTO, Technical Partner
Agent Inbox (Freelance)
- Contributed to the growth and recognition of Agent Inbox, the world's leading real estate messaging platform.
- Designed technical architecture, mentored team, and resolved problems of product users.
- Solved problems that restricted the team's ability to deliver the product, reworked the previous solution, simplified the codebase, optimized the development process using Lean principles.
- Delivered the first MVP within two months, which allowed founders to attract investors and customers and increase the investments to scale the development.
- Reduced risks of having new bugs implementing the development optimization: introduced code review, eliminated unnecessary routines, and integrated automatized tests, which significantly reduced the cost of new developers' onboarding process.
- Scaled the team to six developers in one year. Set up distributed onboarding process to make the team responsible for self-organization.
- Implemented the high standards for code solutions got companies willing to acquire the product.
VP Engineering, R&D Director
Faria Education Group (Freelance)
- Managed full-cyсle of product development and design architecture improvements for Open Apply. The technology stack is based on Ruby on Rails and React.
- Improved collaboration with related departments to organize effective product updates. Grew the R&D office in Ukraine.
- Built a long-term refactoring strategy to simplify the codebase. It increased team effectiveness by 20% in 3 months.
- Removed high-performance computing operations for application and tests, reducing the whole test suite time from 1 hour to 15 min.
- By integration, Lean principles and automatized tests prevented the accretion of new regression bugs. A list of known bugs was reduced from 500 to 10 within three months instead of growing each month, as it was before.
- Helped the team deliver a full redesign of the legacy functionality in 2 weeks instead of an estimated three months.
- Integrated code and management practices to scale the team of developers from five to 20 in six months without any velocity decrease.
- As a result, the team was willing to add more checks to prevent regressions, and the cost of adding a new feature was decreased by $33,000 per month.
Senior Full-stack Engineer
BigBinary (Freelance)
- Developed code practices to have Ruby on Rails Testable Architecture.
- Created processes to run a remote development team.
- Set up R&D in Eastern Europe with remote onboarding and provided visibility to prevent wastes and problems.
Experience
Agent Inbox
Accomplishments:
• Set up a transparent process
• Built R&D team: scaled from 1 developer to 10 developers
• Got customer satisfaction and business recognition
• Led strategy and directed scaling, architecture, engineering, supervised product and data, science teams
• Developed technology platforms and mobile products using front-end frameworks, including Ruby on Rails/React/React Native with REST APIs
• Developed data pipelines for driving massive ETL architectures to support extraction, ingestion, formatting, and matching of data
• Automated CI/CD pipelines using the following technologies: Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub
• Delivered production systems with real-time monitoring, alerting, and logging to reduce the needs of having operational staff
• Provided direct support to founders for M&A discussions for product acquisitions
Open Apply
http://openapply.comAccomplishments:
• Set up a transparent process
• Applied practices to deliver changes with confidence
• Built R&D team: scaled from 2 to 20 developers and QA
• Increased sales and customer satisfaction
• Enhanced code readability for better product performance. We drastically enhanced the product's code readability to set the product up for current and future success. Our code quality rank on Code Climate was raised from level F to A. Plus, we significantly reduced bug risks by introducing code practices and efficient tests.
• Improved rendering for faster performance. We reduced the average request processing time from 3 seconds to 0.2 seconds, and the average page rendering time dropped from 600 ms to 200 ms.
Knight Foundation
http://knightfoundation.orgAccomplishments:
• Set up a transparent process
• Applied practices to deliver changes with confidence
• Production release decreased from 1 day to 0.5 hours
Mobile Coach
http://mobilecoach.comAccomplishments:
• Set up a transparent process
• Applied practices to deliver changes with confidence
• Built R&D team: scaled from 2 to 10 developers
• Increased sales and customer satisfaction
Campsyte
Accomplishments:
• Set up a transparent process
• Delivered beta in quickly
• Helped to get paying users in just a few months
Skills
Languages
JavaScript, Ruby, TypeScript, Crystal, SAML, Go
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Capybara, Stimulus, Cypress, AngularJS, React Native, Tailwind CSS, Nuxt.js, Angular
Libraries/APIs
jQuery, React, Stripe API
Tools
Docker Compose, JavaScript Testing, CircleCI, GitHub, RSpec
Paradigms
Test-driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment, Kanban, Agile, Design Patterns, REST, Web Architecture, Web Application Architecture, Continuous Delivery (CD), Extreme Programming, DevOps, Management
Platforms
Docker, Heroku, Linux, Director, Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Storage
PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3)
Other
Leadership, Lean Development, Team Leadership, Remote Work, Remote Team Leadership, QA Automation, Technical Leadership, APIs, Legacy Code, CTO, Team Mentoring, Architecture, GitOps, Customer Success, Account Management, Infrastructure, Executive Coaching, Agile Leadership, Material Design, Scrum Master, RETS, Agile DevOps, WebSockets, Platform as a Service (PaaS), SAML-auth, Agile Delivery, Agile Coaching, Lean, Engineering, Product Discovery, Stakeholder Management
Education
Master's Degree in Applied Mathematics
Donetsk National University - Ukraine
Certifications
Functional Programming Principles In Scala
Coursera
Computing For Data Analysis
Coursera
Machine Learning
Coursera