github.com/rick · rick@rickbradley.com · Nashville, TN
Consultant (6/2021 - now; multiple years over the past two decades) - Systems, project, and team consulting. Customers have significant production applications, forward progress has slowed. My focus is on changing high- and low-level processes, writing and changing systems directly alongside developers, and training in techniques to keep things moving rapidly (and safely) in the future.
Principal Engineer (1/2020 - 6/2021) - 1st employee; 1 of 3 engineers; built product from whiteboard specs through to highly scalable production; (buzzword salad: datomic, vault, graphql, apollo/react, oauth, aws cdk, postgres), security-audited / verified google 3rd-party application for restricted scopes, etc.
Chief Dad Officer (7/2018-8/2019) - Guided child direction, worked directly with child management and individual child contributors in a flexible and reactive play environment. Assisted with team growth and skill acquisition. Advised founders and stakeholders up to and through Initial Kindergarten Offering. Note: Maintain an ongoing advisory role with on-call commitments.
Senior / Lead Engineer (7/2017 - 7/2018) - Guided team development and direction, worked directly with senior and junior engineers, assisted in iteration on product design, worked to revamp reactive / on-call processes, introduced large-scale refactoring risk management tooling, shipped important customer-facing feature improvements and performance enhancements, iteratively improved development / CI / deployment tooling and processes, etc. Lead developer on rapid implementation of full GDPR compliance.
Principal Software Engineer -> Principal Improvement Engineer -> Engineer Advisor (2/2015-6/2017) - Led continual, incremental, iterative refinement of software delivery processes, tools, and techniques across Engineering. Created engineering metrics team, cross-functional optimization group (“The Pit Crew”), led complete overhaul of CI systems delivering production builds on 90+ platforms for all significant products, including focused small-team custom scheduler development to address long-standing capacity issues. Part of a 4-person development team using rapid iterative techniques to take new product from concept to customer-ready, including automated deployment tooling and customer-facing infrastructure, in 3 months.
Developer (6/2012 - 12/2014) - Hired to “perform a rescue mission … on github.com”. Invented tools and techniques to allow for radical re-engineering of GitHub systems. Part of a 4-person team which safely replaced the entire permissioning and organizational back-end of the core product. Contributed to projects across the organization. Invented scientist.
Founder, Developer (1/2008 - 6/2012) - The “A Team” of Ruby/Rails rescue forces. Purely word-of-mouth referrals. Worked for clients with significant running production systems suffering critical technical and organizational problems. Jump-started projects and teams via both technical and social means, bringing them to self-sustaining forward progress. Acquired by GitHub in 2012.
Project Manager (5/2005 - 8/2007) - Recruited world-class talent, introduced Agile and BDD techniques, guided deployment strategy. Advised executives, worked directly with developers and end-users on design and development of a large research-enabled clinical record system for use across a multi-state organization.
Lead Developer (9/2002 - 3/2005) - Redesigned core software (medical transcription industry), introduced repeatability and stability, revamped support methodologies, developed new applications (VOIP platform, document management, and workflow systems) which changed the direction and measurably improved the long-term viability of the organization.
Founder, Developer (11/1998 - 9/2002) - Developed legal industry online tools, moved into design and implementation of custom content management systems. Advised third-party integrators of our platform. Built first open online system for Georgia statute and case law information. Paid out investors and retained a profit.
Founder, Developer (4/1998 - 10/1999) - Designed and built web-based and “n-tier” systems for clients in the NY financial services industry. Responsible for bidding and estimation, project planning. Always profitable.
Developer (1/1997 - 11/1998) - Worked with geniuses as one of 100 employees of the most successful hedge fund on the planet. Learned finance, designed and developed powerful and reliable large systems.
Not Hardee’s Material (5/1988-7/1988?) - Actually did some pretty amazing things with the deep fryer. Co-organizer of the first annual “see how long you can stay in the deep freezer” / “what’s the tallest { burger, soft serve cone } you can make” / “who can eat the oldest thing under the lamps?” intramural olympics.
Spoke at 1st (and later) Rails Conf(s), RubyConf, Ruby Hoedown (multiple), Madison Ruby, JS Channel India (keynote), Nash.rb (multiple), Nashville Java Users Group (multiple), Nashville Linux Users Group (multiple), various in-house talks for companies by invite. Member, 1993 World Finalist ACM programming team. Published “Fabricating Arrays of Strings” (cite). Erdős number of 3. I’ve been running the Nashville Silent Meditation Group for over a decade.
This document lives at rick.github.io/resume