Rob Cameron, Developer in San Marcos, CA, United States
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Rob Cameron

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Ruby Developer

Location
San Marcos, CA, United States
Toptal Member Since
April 11, 2015

Rob has a rare skill set combining development and design. He's able to work on the entire web stack from design, UI and front-end engineering to back-end services and APIs and to setting up servers and deployment. He believes in simple, elegant, and streamlined solutions.

Portfolio

The Active Network
JavaScript, Elasticsearch, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby
Janssen Pharmaceuticals
MySQL, AngularJS, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby
Codestarter
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Stripe, Sass, Haml, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, MySQL...

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Sublime Text, Git, MacOS

The most amazing...

...thing I've coded was a real-time activity stream API/front-end for a company with 40+ web apps and millions of daily users.

Work Experience

Software Engineer (Contractor)

2014 - 2015
The Active Network
  • Responsible for upgrading a live production instance of Elasticsearch from 0.90 to 1.3, including updating a customer-facing Rails-based API.
  • Implemented functionality to both Ruby on Rails back-end and the custom JavaScript framework front-end.
Technologies: JavaScript, Elasticsearch, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Software Engineer (Contractor)

2014 - 2014
Janssen Pharmaceuticals
  • Worked on the company’s medication adherence application, both the Rails back-end and Angular.js front-end.
  • Recreated a patient/physician information site including an HTML5 WYSIWYG editor to allow the product manager to make changes without a developer. The entire site was finished in two weeks.
Technologies: MySQL, AngularJS, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Principal Software Engineer

2013 - 2014
Codestarter
  • Took over from a contract implementation and added Stripe integration and an email system in three days to meet a launch deadline.
  • Solely responsible for development, design, deployment, you-name-it, reporting directly to the CEO.
  • Implemented a simple inventory/shipping process for getting dozens of laptops in the door and back out to kids as quickly as possible.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Stripe, Sass, Haml, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, MySQL, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Principal Software Engineer

2012 - 2013
Popexpert, Inc
  • Founding team member, lead developer, and sole designer for the entire popexpert.com web app.
  • Integrated Stripe payment processing as well as custom conference calendaring and scheduling UI, both front-end and back-end.
  • Integrated peer-to-peer WebRTC audio/video conferencing through third-party providers and from scratch.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), WebRTC, Sass, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Senior Software Engineer

2006 - 2012
The Active Network
  • Mentored a half-dozen new developers as they learned Ruby to rebuild active.com from scratch.
  • Lead developer and mentor for Active Educate school accounting software. Rebuilt the application from scratch in Ruby on Rails while training two other developers with no previous Ruby experience.
  • Built Active Timeline: a real-time feed of user activity across dozens of Active’s web properties. Created a Sinatra app that accepted data via a RESTful API and presented it via API or HTML.
  • Lead developer and mentor for Active Trainer, an online fitness and activity tracker. Rebuilt an existing Java application from scratch in Ruby on Rails in record time while training 4 other developers with no Ruby experience.
  • Started the Light Engineering Group to prototype new products and bring various ideas to life on super tight deadlines and with maximum quality. Ask about Active Realtime, Jungle, Active Widgets, and others.
  • Responsible for UI and UX on the company’s flagship active.com site.
  • First at a company of hundreds of developers to use AJAX, to build anything in Ruby and Rails (which later became a cornerstone for new development), to consume and create RESTful web services, and to deploy production applications on AWS.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle, MySQL, Sass, Haml, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Sinatra, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Popexpert

Popexpert provides one-on-one video meetings with experts to help you learn something new and connect with others no matter where you live.

I was a founding team member, working remotely from my home in Southern California while the rest of the team was based in San Francisco. I was solely responsible for design and was one of two developers for the first 8 months of the product's life (a third developer was then brought on).

At the time we created the product WebRTC had only officially launched in the Chrome dev channel and wouldn't be publicly available for a couple of months. We knew this was the direction we wanted to go so we went forward. Our solution worked great but we later replaced it with a third-party who specialized in only WebRTC so we could focus on other areas of the site.

Shared Decision-making

An information site for patients to learn about certain medical procedures and provides a starting point for a conversation with their doctor.

The site is a simple Ruby on Rails app but includes the Mercury HTML5 WYSIWYG editor (http://jejacks0n.github.io/mercury). The content team can log in, make live changes to the page (no need to shuttle off to a separate CMS system), and have them appear instantly.

This was a last-minute project and the whole thing was completed in just under two weeks.

Codestarter

Codestarter helps get laptops for kids who want to learn to code but don't otherwise have access to a computer. I was a founding member and was solely responsible for design and development. We accepted donations via Stripe, purchased $200 Acer Chromebooks, flashed them with a custom install of Ubuntu and then shipped them off to lucky kids.

Languages

CSS, HTML, Ruby, JavaScript, Haml, Sass

Frameworks

Ruby on Rails (RoR), Sinatra, Bootstrap 3, GrapesJS, AngularJS

Tools

Adobe Photoshop, Mailchimp, Capistrano, Sketch, Sublime Text 3, Git, Sublime Text

Other

Front-end Development

Libraries/APIs

Stripe, jQuery, Backbone.js, WebRTC

Paradigms

Agile Software Development, Test-driven Development (TDD), Responsive Web Design (RWD), Metaprogramming

Platforms

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle, MacOS

Storage

Elasticsearch, SQLite, MySQL, CouchDB

1996 - 1998

Partially Completed Degree in Computer Arts

State University of New York, Buffalo - Buffalo, NY

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