Joshua Bates

Current

• Software Engineer at JackRabbit Systems

Past

• Software Engineer at Caring.com
• Software Engineer at Vizulex Inc.
• Software Engineer at Never Sold Out

• Software Engineer at Democracy Now
• Web Developer at Studio X
• Founder at Dropcaster
• Web Developer at Xynergy
• Programmer at Virtual Sites

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Recommended

7 people have recommended Joshua

Connections

74 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Joshua Bates’s Summary

I've been a developer/designer of web based software and sites for seven years. For the last four years I've been primarily working with ruby, including many non-rails based projects.

Much of my work has focused around large scale ruby systems primarily running in the background using backgroundrb, beanstalk, nanite/rabbitmq and resque. They've handled millions of jobs a day, running across several servers.

I bring the same level of rigor to the front end as the rest of my work. I write semantically correct markup and modular & maintainable cross browser CSS, using Haml/Sass & Compass.

http://github.com/joshuabates

Joshua Bates’s Specialties:

Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, XHTML/CSS, Haml, Sass, JavaScript, jQuery, Prototype, EC2, Linux, MySQL, Memcached/Redis, Background Processing, Screen Scraping, Object Oriented Design, Refactoring, TDD

Joshua Bates’s Experience

• Software Engineer

  JackRabbit Systems

  (Computer Software industry)

  January 2009 — Present (1 year 1 month)

  Lead developer. Working on numerous ruby based projects.
  
  - Built a hotel reservation engine
  - Ruby DSL to speed up the creation & maintenance of 100's of recipes for pulling data from our partners
  - Scalable Nanite/AMQP based message queue to handle massive background processing load (millions/day)
  - Added the ability to index hotel specials, becoming the first in our industry do to so
  - Improved API search response over an order of magnitude using Redis
  - Migrated all company applications & services to EC2 with Rightscale. Designed network architecture and server templates

• Software Engineer

  Caring.com

  (Privately Held; Internet industry)

  December 2007 — January 2009 (1 year 2 months)

  Used Ruby on Rails to build various parts of the site
  
  - Built Local, To-Do Lists, Ask and Answer, and other sections
  - Extensive front end work using Haml, Sass, and Compass (which my team-mate wrote). IE6 was also supported.
  - Built ETL tool to load data from numerous partners into our local section.
  - Cut our build time in half
  - Created Alzheimer's widget builder, raising $10,000 for the Alzheimer's Association, and bringing in over 1000 new inbound links.

• Software Engineer

  Vizulex Inc.

  (Privately Held; Internet industry)

  March 2006 — October 2007 (1 year 8 months)

  Used the Java based framework thinkmap to build the company's proof-of-concept prototype. I created web-based software to help doctors easily visualize potential interactions between multiple prescription drugs, and botanicals. Worked with another developer on a rewrite in Ruby on Rails and Flash.

• Software Engineer

  Never Sold Out

  (Computer Software industry)

  May 2006 — July 2007 (1 year 3 months)

  Created a web-based application that streamlines inventory purchasing from multiple vendors, replacing an outsourced system that cost the company close to 25K per month. The solution combined a Ruby on Rails interface to distributed Ruby, pushing content to the browser with Comet.

• Software Engineer

  Democracy Now

  (Broadcast Media industry)

  November 2005 — June 2007 (1 year 8 months)

  Lead rails developer for the new website of this nationally syndicated radio program.
  
  - Built multilingual rails plugin for our spanish language section
  - Created gmail like multlingual aware ajax spellchecker
  - Created custom admin sections tailored towards allowing the shows producers to rapidly get the days show up.

• Web Developer

  Studio X

  (Internet industry)

  September 2004 — November 2005 (1 year 3 months)

  Perl/PHP/Rails programming, and XHTML/CSS build outs for local e-commerce sites.

• Founder

  Dropcaster

  (Internet industry)

  April 2005 — September 2005 (6 months)

  Built a podcasting system for independent musicians with Ruby on Rails.

• Web Developer

  Xynergy

  (Internet industry)

  April 2003 — July 2004 (1 year 4 months)

  Lead PHP/Perl developer for various government and e-commerce sites, including http://www.newmexico.org and http://www.governor.state.nm.us/

• Programmer

  Virtual Sites

  (Internet industry)

  January 2001 — January 2002 (1 year 1 month)

Additional Information

Joshua Bates’s Groups:

•    Ruby on Rails
•    BayAPLN
•    Rubyists

Joshua Bates’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• job inquiries
• reference requests
• getting back in touch