
Richard Nienaber
Verified Expert in Engineering
APIs Developer
A passionate developer, Richard has over 16 years of experience in various web technologies. He is at home in Ruby or Node.js and is constantly looking to improve his skills. He reads about technologies, processes, and best practices, and he tries to be pragmatic in applying them.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Git, Linux, IntelliJ, Back-end, DevOps
The most amazing...
...project I've worked on is a distributed command and control system for load-testing web applications.
Work Experience
Senior DevOps Engineer
Salesforce
- Streamlined workflows with Chef and Windows Server deployment onto the Google Cloud Platform.
- Created a Ruby gem that helped simplify certain DevOps tasks for the development teams.
Senior Node.js Engineer
RentReporters
- Developed back-end microservices in Node.js using RabbitMQ and Mongo.
- Implemented zero-downtime deploys with Docker and HAProxy, improving productivity and team agility.
- Used Ansible for configuration management and deployment. Wrote custom Python scripts to close the gap between Ansible and Docker.
- Maintained systems for monitoring (Zabbix) and metrics collection (StatsD/Graphite).
- Implemented features in Angular front-ends.
- Introduced 'ChatOps,' which allowed common deployment tasks to be completed from within HipChat. A much loved feature by QA.
Technical Lead
Currency Cloud
- Developed the specifications for v2 of the company's API.
- Managed external development resources.
- Introduced messaging to the platform to improve stability and performance.
- Reviewed code from all teams to ensure standards are kept.
- Introduced rate limiting to the API to ensure platform stability and prevent misuse.
- Introduced 'ChatOps' to allow common deployment tasks to be completed from within HipChat.
Senior Developer
The Spotlight
- Implemented load balancing and performance optimization utilizing Varnish.
- Introduced Scrum to the team.
- Implemented a dashboard in Python in my spare time to view the current state of Varnish servers.
- Supported various core applications that dealt with actor profiles.
- Created a video complete with clickable annotations for an ad campaign.
Senior Software Developer
Trafalgar Management Services, Ltd.
- Supported a booking system for a worldwide travel company.
- Worked effectively to clean up a legacy code base.
- Defined specs for and developed an API for external partners to access.
- Introduced code reviews for the team.
- Helped recruitment by conducting technical interviews.
Experience
IronPython
https://github.com/IronLanguages/mainLoupe
https://github.com/rjnienaber/loupeTechEmpower Benchmarks
https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarksSkills
Languages
TypeScript, Ruby, JavaScript, C#, Python, JRuby, XML, SQL, XSD
Frameworks
Sinatra, Swagger, ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails (RoR), NHibernate, Angular, Windows PowerShell, Selenium, Capybara
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, LINQ, jQuery, Moq, ActiveRecord, AutoMapper, PhantomJS
Tools
Git, Vagrant, Ansible, Subversion (SVN), Zabbix, Bamboo, RabbitMQ, Varnish, Microsoft Visual Studio, Packer, Cucumber, RubyMine, TeamCity, Castle Windsor, Terraform, Chef, HipChat, Jira, Bitbucket, ReSharper, Jenkins, IntelliJ
Other
HAProxy, GNU, Messaging Patterns, APIs, SOAP, Consul, Back-end
Paradigms
REST, Agile Software Development, Test-driven Development (TDD), API Architecture, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Continuous Integration (CI), FluentValidation, DevOps
Platforms
DigitalOcean, Docker, Linux, TorqueBox, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Windows
Storage
MongoDB, JSON, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle RDBMS, Redis, SQL Server 2008
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology – Software Development
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University - Port Elizabeth