Todd Kummer
Verified Expert in Engineering
Enterprise Application Design Developer
Oakland, CA, United States
Toptal member since February 10, 2021
Todd's best fit is a client looking for an expert Ruby on Rails architect to help build a new solution or, conversely, someone to help rescue a codebase that has gone astray. His long history of product development—for software companies, internal business applications, and consumer websites—helps him find the right balance between short-term and long-term requirements and implement best practices that will help guide the project through its full lifecycle.
Portfolio
Experience
- Enterprise Application Design - 20 years
- Best Practices - 10 years
- Ruby - 10 years
- Ruby on Rails (RoR) - 8 years
- RSpec - 7 years
- PostgreSQL - 6 years
- Stimulus - 6 years
- Docker - 5 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Ruby on Rails (RoR)
The most amazing...
...solution I've built is the gem Filterameter, which simplifies and speeds development of Rails controllers by making filter parameters declarative.
Work Experience
Technical Lead
Research Laboratory
- Led a team of 6-8 remote developers, including contractors and employees.
- Revamped the build and deploy process, deployed a single consistent image to all environments, and addressed security vulnerabilities by making it easy to upgrade libraries.
- Built a library to wrap the Artemis gem (GraphQL) and generate results with models, batching, and enumeration.
- Introduced Turbo and Stimulus to the existing application.
- Collaborated with scientists to help define and address software requirements.
- Brought a non-running test suite back to life and increased test coverage.
Ruby on Rails Engineer
SaaS HR Platform
- Rewrote a search index job to cut a 30-hour process to one hour, using parallel processing and batching calls to remote services.
- Built a custom Elasticsearch adapter for the Graphiti library to enable JSON API-compliant endpoints to be backed by a search index.
- Refactored legacy code to enable logic reuse during the transition from the Ember front end to React and retired unused code from the legacy application.
- Reduced RSpec test time by more than 50% while increasing code coverage.
- Mentored a small team of developers learning Ruby on Rails.
Ruby on Rails Engineer
Fortune 500 Retailer
- Brought in best practices to a small group working in spreadsheets and reporting tools without much support from IT. Stressed the importance of automation and test environments in mitigating risk.
- Designed an application to capture user requests (previously sent by email), enable approval workflow, and apply updates programmatically (previously done with manual SQL statements).
- Built Ruby on Rails API for an application using a PostgreSQL database and a Redis Cache.
- Wrote a Docker build file for deployment to Kubernetes.
Ruby on Rails Engineer
Agricultural Supply Chain Platform
- Refactored code to standardize and encapsulate the generation of accounting entries.
- Worked with the development team to focus on unit testing first. This effort helped speed up tests by 30%.
- Designed and built flexible contract templates to allow pricing to be defined at multiple levels across multiple harvests.
- Created monthly farmer statements showing inventory and processing information.
- Updated the developer setup to use Docker for the database, removing the need for a local installation. This enabled development on Linux and made the database upgrade easy for the development team.
Ruby on Rails Engineer
Fortune 500 Retailer
- Architected a product catalog to support multiple roles, each defined by business users. The configuration was collected in a Ruby on Rails app that turned it into both serializers for the API and a contract for the SPA front end.
- Crafted a Docker Compose file for developers to run the application with a Sinatra app, a database (PostgreSQL), a cache (Redis), a search index, and five Rails apps. Included proxy server so individual local services would automatically switch over.
- Designed a custom ETL framework to capture data from disparate systems, including web services, flat files, and external databases. It was built using Ruby on Rails, which enabled developers to map from source data to a consolidated data model quickly.
Ruby on Rails Engineer
E-tailer Startup
- Designed and built a framework to publish data to multiple external systems. Each of the 20+ endpoints could have different triggers, target types (file, SOAP, and web services), formats (JSON and XML), and size thresholds.
- Developed an inventory management platform and enabled an e-tailer to manage drop ship and owned inventory availability.
- Converted and cleaned up redundant SKU data to enable double dropdowns (size, color, finish, etc.) on the product display page.
- Built a Java-based service to find similar products. Implemented the related products feature on the consumer website.
Experience
Filterameter: Declarative Filter Parameters for Rails Controllers
https://github.com/RockSolt/filterameterAfter writing lots of this code and seeing it written inconsistently, even within a single application, I built a gem to enable declarative filter parameters for Rails controllers.
A straightforward DSL allows developers to call out allowable filters, including validations, nested filters, and name overrides. There is no other code to write!
Connecting Controllers in Stimulus
https://github.com/toddkummer/stimulus/wiki/Related-Controllers-for-StimulusNext Page: Pagination for Rails Controllers
https://github.com/RockSolt/next_pageRun Time Settings: Persisted Key-value Pairs for App Settings
https://github.com/RockSolt/run_time_settingsHowever, if users want to change a value more frequently or want someone without the ability to do a deployment to change a value, another solution is needed. This Ruby gem provides it, allowing developers to quickly add run time settings wherever they make the most sense: on a job, on a model, or even on a PORO.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in English
University of California, Berkeley - Berkeley, CA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Ruby on Rails API, REST APIs, Graphiti
Tools
RSpec, RuboCop, Turbo, Docker Compose
Languages
Ruby, SQL, JavaScript, HTML, GraphQL, Java, CSS
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Stimulus, Ruby on Rails 5, Ruby on Rails 7, Ruby on Rails 6, minitest
Paradigms
Clean Code, Best Practices, Design Patterns, Agile
Platforms
Docker, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes
Storage
PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch
Other
Communication, Enterprise Application Design, Mentorship & Coaching, Data Modeling, Mentorship, APIs, Server-side Rendering (SSR), Full-stack, Technical Leadership, eCommerce
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring