Personal details

Thomas C. - Remote full-stack developer

Thomas C.

Based in: 🇵🇹 Portugal
Timezone: Lisbon (UTC+1)

Summary

I enjoy helping projects of all kinds to move forward, solving a wide variety of problems, and producing well-tested code that is clean and thoughtful and that keeps paths open for future extension. Though most of my recent years have been spent building within the Elixir and Phoenix/LiveView ecosystem, I also have many years of experience with Ruby on Rails.

I use a Lean perspective when planning a project and writing code, keeping a reasonable balance between short-term and long-term and between perfection and achievable greatness, as I explore the solution space iteratively. I have made a special study of software development productivity analysis and improvement, so I have insights and techniques to contribute from that domain.

Over many years I have built internal and external B2B and B2C Full-Stack Web apps and Backend APIs for small companies, startups, and large organizations in the Advertising, Marketing, Education, Meal Kit, Health and Fitness, Accounting, Finance, Government, and International HR spaces.

Along with that experience, my thinking was also shaped by the degrees I earned in Chemical Engineering and Computer Science, which formed an outlook that combines an engineer’s calculated pragmatism with the rigor of theoretical explorations and known methods, including significant exposure to Statistics, Data Mining, and Numerical Methods.

While meticulous with my time and productivity, I value calm thinking, deep work, and a methodical process that also takes intuitive leaps and assesses a range of options, to drive delivery of projects and features.

That ethos is reflected in my ongoing Phoenix LiveView (PETAL) side project, Peak Pace, which captures my research into techniques that go beyond typical Kanban and resource capacity management, to model and effectively optimize the productivity and predictability of business and team processes using BPMN, simulations, and queuing theory. Those same analytical tools are also valuable when diagnosing software application performance.

I’m a U.S. citizen living for now in Portugal, and I have good conversational ability in German.

Work Experience

Software Prototype Engineer
Fluxgate Inc. | Feb 2024 - Present
Elixir
CQRS
Phoenix
Phoenix LiveView

Iterating with beta users on a multi-faceted Phoenix LiveView web app that quantifies and optimizes an organization's work delivery throughput, time-to-completion, and actor capacity utilization, to achieve measurable, lean delivery and prediction accuracy improvements.

- Formulating insights and taking small, prioritized steps forward in end-to-end product functionality

- Owning the process from concept, UI/UX design, development, content marketing, and search ad campaigns, to post-launch analysis, solution validation, variant experiments, and pivots.

- Elixir technologies: Surface UI components, Commanded event-driven CQRS, Ash Framework

Senior Software Engineer
Remote.com | Aug 2023 - Jan 2024
PostgreSQL
Elixir
Phoenix
RESTful API
Delivered HRIS features for the flagship product by implementing Public and Internal REST APIs, built with Elixir and Phoenix with code organization that conformed to disciplined team design standards.

Education

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Master's degreeComputer Science
Sep 2006 - Dec 2009
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
Bachelor's degreeChemical Engineering
Sep 1996 - May 1999

Personal Projects

Peak Pace - a Workflow and Team Capacity Management, Analysis, and Optimization AppIconOpenNewWindows
2023
PostgreSQL
Elixir
CQRS
Styled-Components
Tailwind css
Phoenix LiveView
While still a rough prototype that is still evolving, this personal project captures some of my vision for a workflow optimization system that is inspired by Kanban and Lean but goes a little deeper. Peak Pace leverages insights and techniques from Operations Research in order to provide more a quantitative view of team processes and productivity and to locate specific bottlenecks where a team can focus improvement efforts for maximum gains. (Try playing against its algorithm here: https://www.peakpace.app/play-vs-ai-in-workflow-game and read details about its philosophy here: https://www.peakpace.app/) This was also a project that allowed me to experiment with the Commanded CQRS and Ash Framework libraries, with a bit of the Gleam language.