Steven Kryskalla
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Commerce Charter Township, MI, United States
Toptal member since November 10, 2014
Steven is a full-stack software engineer and web developer with nearly a decade of experience working on large consumer projects for some of the world's most easily recognizable companies. Recently focused on DevOps, he is a smart and personable professional who can tackle solo or team challenges with equal ease.
Portfolio
Experience
- Linux - 15 years
- Python - 13 years
- JavaScript - 8 years
- Redis - 5 years
- Git - 5 years
- Flask - 4 years
- DevOps - 3 years
- Ruby - 3 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Terminal, Linux, Git, Firefox, Vi
The most amazing...
...thing I built in 24 hours was a distributed MySQL traffic replayer (dumping packets, parsing the MySQL protocol, filtering, distributing queries to clients).
Work Experience
Software Engineer, Release Engineering
Dropbox
- Operationalized and automated manual processes related to desktop client builds (Windows, Linux, and OSX).
- Maintained and improved the existing build system (Trac, Bitten, py.test) for desktop clients.
- Designed and deployed a new desktop client build system using Jenkins, VMware vSphere, and Python.
- Participated in on-call rotation for build issues.
- Wrote custom puppet modules for OS X and Linux to provision build infrastructure.
Senior Back-end Engineer
CommandIQ
- Improved the reliability and functionality of back-end systems (data processing pipeline).
- Used auto-scaling groups for deployment (Netflix-style red/black deploys of new AMIs).
- Integrated Rollbar for better visibility of platform errors and exceptions.
- Added monitoring via CloudWatch.
- Managed a Redshift data warehouse cluster (data loading, unloading, monitoring, cluster resizing, etc.).
Senior Software Engineer, Operations
Lumosity (Lumos Labs)
- Fixed hardware failures, network failures, MySQL and Redis crashes, bad deploys, DDoS attacks, failed maintenance windows, and more at all hours of the day.
- Managed 150 dedicated servers (dedicated hardware from SoftLayer).
- Sharded and scaled clusters for MySQL, Redis, and Memcached.
- Added automation and monitoring for all levels of the stack.
- Managed configuration with Chef and Ansible.
Software Engineer, Operations
Lolapps
- Rewrote copy-pasted Bash deployment scripts as clean, re-usable Python code (with Fabric).
- Migrated internal Subversion repos to Git and GitHub.
- Set up a continuous integration and deployment system using Jenkins.
- Implemented automated rolling of MySQL table partitions to safely rotate out old data on live database servers.
- Helped manage 200+ dedicated servers in many capacities including provisioning, automation, and maintenance.
Software Engineer
ePrize
- Built online promotions for top brands such as Xbox, Disney, Gap, Condé Nast, Dell, and Coca-Cola.
- Led development on Xbox Live Rewards.
- Built custom CMS and internationalization functionality on top of Django.
- Did back-end engineering work for large scale email marketing campaigns via ExactTarget.
- Developed Facebook applications.
- Integrated and built data exchanges for clients using a broad range of technologies (SOAP, REST, SFTP, Java, C#, Perl, Python, etc.).
- Created custom reports and dashboards for clients to help them visualize their programs' metrics.
Robotics Lab Assistant
Lawrence Technological University
- Built software to generate thousands of pages of printed material for Robofest competitions (certificates, name badges, signs, etc.).
- Did web development for Robofest.net using Java, JSP, and Python.
- Taught classes and led workshops on robotics for people of all ages (grade school through adult).
- Helped organize and run Robofest events.
- Conducted systems administration for robotics and computer labs on campus (Linux, Windows, Solaris).
Experience
Journal of Brief Ideas
https://github.com/physicsdavid/journalofbriefideasOpenXC Taximeter
https://github.com/lost-theory/ingenuity-taxiXbox Live Rewards
Disney Movie Rewards
http://www.disneymovierewards.go.com/My StackOverflow profile
http://stackoverflow.com/users/75956/lost-theoryEducation
Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics
Lawrence Technological University - Southfield, Michigan
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Fabric, REST APIs, Facebook Open Graph API, RQ, Twilio API, X (formerly Twitter) API, Underscore.js, jQuery, Facebook API
Tools
Nagios, GitHub, Git, Mercurial, Terminal, Chef, Boto, Puppet, Jenkins, VMware vSphere, Trac, Subversion (SVN), Adobe Photoshop, Audacity, Paint.NET, Inkscape
Languages
Python, JavaScript, SQL, Bash, Java, C, C++, Ruby, Perl
Frameworks
Flask, Pylons, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Django
Platforms
Linux, MacOS, Firefox, CentOS, Amazon EC2, Android, Windows, Mailgun
Storage
Redis, Memcached, MySQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Redshift, PostgreSQL, MongoDB
Paradigms
DevOps, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Functional Programming, Agile Software Development, Asynchronous Programming, Scrum, Concurrent Programming
Other
Graphite, Vi, HAProxy, SOAP, Robotics, SVG, Bitten, Tornado
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