- Leading a team of 9 developers.
- Implementing product improvements that support the sale of Toptal services to Enterprise clients.
- Improving workflow and delivery.
- Driving engineering excellence.
- Ensuring team is delivering high-value results.
- Helping guide and direct the technical and product strategy.
- Overseeing the implementation of engineering best practices.

Team Lead

This is my language of choice and my personal favorite. I write Web apps in it (Rails or otherwise), I write scripts in it. I write command-line utilities in it. I use Rake, Docker as my personal ops tools.

I read a ton of books and am still amazed by the expressiveness and complexity of the language, also marveling at the beautiful concise code that can be written in it.

I've done quite a few apps in Rails, mostly complicated apps with few users (very domain specific) and I love the speed of development that it brings once you get the hang of it. This is my go to framework for any non-trivial new project.

But the speed of development is a trade-off. I've worked with probably ~20 frameworks in my time. Rails make it very easy to produce really low quality code, which allows senior developers to work fast, but also allows sloppy code which might be hard to maintain. Therefore I think that it's really important to have some enforced code discipline and another pair of eyes. 

From basic validation and clocks to whole client side frameworks - I've been with JavaScript through all of this. It's getting better every day and that's great.

I'm also happy than it replaced Flash as the interactive-enabling language of the Web.

I do most of my production development in CoffeeScript, but I have a firm foundation in JavaScript from the early days so that I understand the internals.

I write modular code and think a lot about JS structure, because it can be a language that can be horribly misused and turned into a tangled mess.

jQuery was a godsend in my early days of Web development, and I've used it ever since. I'm also familiar with some of the other JS frameworks (MooTools) as well as having written several plugins for $() in my career.



I've always used version control, and Git for a while. I develop all of my projects using git (even local, non shared ones) because of it's awesome branching features and the history functionality it gives me.

I feel that there is a lot more to be learned in the really advanced features but I think that I have the basics (remotes, commits, branching, rebasing) down.

Mostly, see: MySQL

But I've also switched to PostgreSQL about 2 years back as my go-to database management system, so I also have experience with more standard SQL implementations.

I'm also doing work on enterprise-level databases in my job: mostly Oracle.

MySQL has been with me since the start of my career as a web developer and I'm pretty knowledgeable about the ins and outs. Because of the limitations of SQL in terms of source control and the antiquated langugae I've always been encouraged to do most of the heavy lifting in code, which means that I've mostly used the data-storing abilities rather than the vestigial programming features.

I do however have a great understanding of queries, execution plans and all of the basics.

I've been making websites since I was 12, and I pretty much understand the DOM and CSS concepts on an intuitive level. 

I've never been the one to go for good looks, but I've always liked to make nice semantic markup with minimal distractions.

I would mark my technical rating on this as 10/10 and the esthethics/graphical side as 6, which averages to an 8 :)

Personal details

Greg K.

Summary

Technical skills

Work Experience