I've been a web developer for over 10 years, working extensively in Ruby (Rails and other frameworks), Python (Django, Pyramid, etc), JavaScript (NodeJS, Express backend; jQuery, React, Angular, etc on frontend).

I've worked on large e-commerce projects, marketing websites designed around SEO principles to drive traffic, internal tools for streamlining business operations for clients, CMS and CRM deployments, and web API developments and integrations.

I'm strong with both backend architecture and overall application design, converting requirements into proposals, roadmaps and prototypes, and the full development, deployment and maintenance lifecycle. I'm fairly strong with sysadmin and devops and have experience designing infrastructure and deployment workflows.

I'm also strong with frontend development: fully modern HTML, CSS (Sass, etc) and JavaScript (ES6, jQuery, React and others), frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation and custom builds, and rich client/single-page apps with AJAX, WebSockets and other new web APIs. I have a good sense of design principles and know my way around Photoshop for using and occasionally creating graphical designs, layouts and other assets. I'm currently spending a lot of time with React and other functional programming approaches to web app design.

Lots of experience with database schema design and management (relational with PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, etc; as well as MongoDB, Redis and others).

I've worked with JS for a long time and saw its evolution as things like jQuery, Underscore/Lodash, NodeJS, ES6 and React each came along and made their marks. I've worked with it in all of these contexts and now I teach web dev students at a JS-based bootcamp several days a week. It's a quirky language still but it can be pretty pleasant to use nowadays, so hopefully I can help improve your relationship with JS!

I've been using Node for a few years, mostly with Express to develop web server applications for websites and APIs. I'm currently a teacher for a web dev bootcamp program based largely on JavaScript and NodeJS.

I've been teaching bootcamp students how to get oriented with React. I especially like sharing the little hints and tricks I've learned that make writing React more expressive (or, less tedious). I've learned a lot about the functional and reactive programming concepts that React is based on.

I've been working with Ruby since around when Ruby on Rails version 1 came out and catapulted its popularity for web development. It was my go-to language for web development and scripting for most of the time since (now it's getting some competition from JavaScript and Clojure).

I have a deep understanding of the Ruby language (apart from just Rails), OOP and design patterns, program architecture, metaprogramming and DSLs and many popular frameworks and libraries including Rails, Sinatra, Padrino, RSpec, etc. I have strong opinions about program design in Ruby to avoid some of its pitfalls with readability, maintainability and unpredictability (aka Perl syndrome), especially when it comes to OOP and Rails and the MVC pattern, and think that good program architecture should be reflective of the specific problem domain rather than being shoe-horned into an opinionated framework (e.g. overly fat controllers and models). Frameworks like Rails aren't "the way", they're tools in the toolbox, and don't replace understanding and using design patterns yourself.

I've been learning Clojure (both backend on the JVM as well as the ClojureScript preprocessor for JavaScript on the frontend) and digging a lot into functional programming in general. I haven't deployed anything serious but I've put a lot of my spare time into developing my skills in this area and drawing upon all my previous experience I have a strong grasp of the language and fundamentals and approaches to program design.

I've worked with Python since around 2010, where I used it for several years primarily for backend web development in Django and Pyramid. I've seen it evolve from Python 2 to 3 (finally) and have a good grasp of both as well as the challenges involved in transitioning. While it's not my main language for web dev, I'm a big fan of many of its philosophies and have a strong grasp of the language and a lot of its internals, and many of the popular libraries.

Personal details

Vaz A.

Summary

Technical skills