
Phil Gebauer
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Calgary, AB, Canada
Toptal member since February 16, 2018
For over 15 years, Phil has worked as a software developer for various fields including medical, eCommerce, social media, and blockchain. During his career, he's been a full-time employee and has worked remotely as a freelancer as well. Throughout those varied engagements, Phil was exposed to a variety of business and engineering challenges and learning opportunities.
Portfolio
Experience
- MySQL - 16 years
- JavaScript - 16 years
- PHP - 14 years
- REST APIs - 8 years
- Microservices - 6 years
- Node.js - 4 years
- React - 4 years
- React Native - 2 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
IntelliJ IDEA, MacOS
The most amazing...
...system improvement I've made is a real-time tweet-matching algorithm that drastically reduced system load while handling several thousands of tweets per second.
Work Experience
Systems Architect | Lead Software Engineer
Veri
- Designed the application and structure of the REST API that serves Veri’s product (a mobile video chat app); built using Node.js and a microservice-ready approach.
- Designed and deployed a scalable back-end infrastructure on AWS and Docker Cloud.
- Set up a fully an automated continuous delivery pipeline using Docker Cloud.
- Mentored the engineering team on development patterns and best practices.
- Maintained a technical roadmap of feature development and app releases in coordination with product owners, engineers, and external mobile development team.
Senior Software Engineer | Lead Software Engineer
Hootsuite
- Led and managed the social advertising team, specifically the development.
- Designed a billing and payments solution with anti-fraud measures for the ads product.
- Integrated and scaled a real-time tweet archiving service using Twitter’s streaming APIs. Added self-healing mechanisms that detect and reopen degraded connections.
- Designed a centralized solution for account authentication—allowing for multiple identity providers and protocols, including Twitter OAuth and SAML.
- Created a REST API design that included the addition of OAuth authentication to the mobile API.
- Researched and implemented a service that converts HTML into PDF documents to study the impact of partitioning and converting a shared code base into services.
- Developed a suite of self-contained PHP libraries used by multiple internal clients.
- Collaborated on the automation of infrastructure provisioning.
- Developed an app for the Hootsuite app directory in my spare time to integrate the European equivalent of LinkedIn and XING into Hootsuite.
Freelance Web Developer
Freelance
- Maintained an eCommerce system.
- Improved the order fulfillment process and inventory management for multiple warehouses.
- Added forecasting for purchase orders, fraud detection checks, and UX improvements for conversion optimization.
- Developed an application that assists in managing document lifecycles.
Web Developer
Invoke Company
- Developed and maintained several client sites and tools with unique requirements, including a native Visual Basic application to convert and upload videos.
- Collaborated on the development of an online music video platform.
- Constructed online video contest websites that eventually evolved into a product for managing online contests.
Software Developer | Network Administrator
Ohio State University Medical Center
- Developed native and web tools for clinical trial patient management using the .NET framework and PHP.
- Maintained the department's local network comprised of Windows servers and desktop computers.
- Configured and built desktop PCs from individually ordered parts.
- Provided IT support for the staff.
Co-op Student Worker
Fraunhofer Institute for Security in IT
- Researched and developed software for the security assessments of IT infrastructures.
Experience
JRAC: A Concise and Easy-to-use JavaScript Client for JSON REST APIs
https://github.com/fubar/jrac• Concise
• Easy to read and use
• Promising
• No unnecessary dependencies
• No unnecessary HTTP abstractions
Since I couldn't find what I was looking for, I built this client.
You can find the complete documentation with code samples at Github.com/fubar/jrac.
A Simple Availability Schedule Library for JavaScript
https://github.com/fubar/availability-scheduleREST API Design and Architecture
The application is bundled into a Docker container and deployed onto multiple AWS EC2 instances via Docker Cloud in a continuous delivery fashion.
Performance and uptime were outstanding which was a great validation of the architecture.
Refactoring of a High-volume, Real-time Tweet-monitoring Service
I rewrote the keyword matching algorithm to mimic the keyword filtering behavior of Twitter’s streaming API, which allowed for reverse matching with user-defined keywords. The new algorithm outperformed the original one by several orders of magnitude thanks to achieving constant-time lookups on its larger data set.
While implementing these improvements, I also added a number of self-healing mechanisms that detect and reestablish degraded connections, resulting in very high uptime.
Education
Bachelor of Science Degree in Information Technology
Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University - Mannheim, Germany
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, REST APIs, React, Restify, jQuery, FFmpeg
Tools
Terraform, IntelliJ IDEA, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Microsoft Access, Vagrant, NGINX, Ansible, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), AWS ELB, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon EKS
Languages
SQL, JavaScript, PHP, TypeScript, VB.NET, Python, Solidity, Scala, Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET)
Paradigms
Agile Software Development, Microservices, Scrum
Storage
MySQL, NoSQL, Memcached, MongoDB, Docker Cloud, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Azure Active Directory
Frameworks
React Native, Swagger, OAuth 2, .NET
Platforms
Apache2, Docker, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Blockchain, MacOS, Linux, Windows Server, osCommerce, Kubernetes
Other
SaaS, eCommerce, RESTful Microservices, Integration Testing, AWS Cloud Architecture, Payment Processing, Information Security, Web Technologies, Streaming, APIs, OAuth, Billing, Advertising, HTTP REST, JSON REST APIs
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