Benjamin Fleischer
  Chicago, IL, United States
  hello at this domain
  http://benjaminfleischer.com

Summary:

• Active open-source software maintainer and contributor.
  • Maintains or collaborates on tens of projects, including ActiveModelSerializers, SimpleCov, RubyGems guide, and RMagick.
  • Has contributed to tens of others, including Rails, Node.js, JSON:API, Kaminari, Homebrew, bcrypt-ruby, and Passenger.
• Core maintainer of ActiveModelSerializers, one of the most popular Ruby serialization libraries.
• Created the RubyGems guides security page

Professional experience:

Web Development Software Engineer – SwipeSense, Inc. – Chicago, IL, July 2015-July 2017

Hand-hygiene sensors and analytics to help healthcare institutions eliminate acquired infections.

• Ruby and Rails, Principal Developer:
  • Responsible for API design, implementation, security, testing, and documentation.
  • Improved development UX, such as by adding headless Chrome testing. Prior to that, added qtchooser.
• Databases Management (MySQL/PostgreSQL/Amazon Redshift):
  • Schema design, query optimization, and index optimization.
  • Created regular backups and easy restores that are regularly tested.
  • ETL (Extract Transform Load) management.
• Created tooling for coding standards automation:
  • Automated style enforcement, security scan, vulnerability scan, and library upgrades.
  • Add Docker-backed database images on CI for continuous testing.
  • Add datamart/analytics data to test and development environment.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS):
  • Wrote scripts to version changes to OpsWorks ENV variables, create resources, deploy resources, and start/stop servers by name.

Web Development Software Engineer – Springleaf Financial Services – Chicago, IL, November 2014-May 2015

• Created tooling for coding standards automation:
  • Common Rails template, API controller base, API client base, worker configuration (including ActiveJob).
  • Code coverage, security, and style via git hooks. (Essential before we had staging or CI).
• Improved team communication:
  • Set up first chat server, wrote up onboarding documents, created employee directory.
  • Set up repository for discussing API design, team process, and sharing learnings.
  • Saved front end devs time by writing scripts for updating all services and populating with dummy data.
• Created and shared diskimage (dmg) of a self-contained wine emulation of APRWin, a critical Windows-only tool.
• Demonstrated leadership in promoting code reviews, encouraging code readability, and openness to extension.

Web Development Software Engineer – Contracting at Poll Everywhere Inc. – San Francisco, CA, January 2014-July 2014

Poll an audience; get instant feedback via web, mobile, text, or tweet.

• Upgraded legacy Rails 2.3 app to Rails 3.2, then to 4.1.
• Reduced SQL queries on serialized columns.

Web Development Software Engineer – SK Intertainment – Chicago, IL, June 2012-December 2013

MrSkin.com, MrMan.com– Adult Entertainment movie site mentioned in ‘Knocked Up’

Radio Prep– GoodPartsMedia.com

• Introduced testing (including TDD), continuous integration (CI), design patterns, and some agile practices.
• Upgraded all Rails apps from Rails 3.0 to 3.2, and Ruby 1.8.7p72 to 1.9.3. Build new Rails app with CRuby backend and JRuby frontend.
• Successfully rearchitected and/or decomplected apps:
  • Separated email management from User model, normalize addresses, improve email bounce processing (Perl).
  • Standardized deploy scripts, logging, error handling, LDAP authentication, pooled SMTP, etc.

Web Development Software Engineer – Metromix/Gannett – Chicago, IL, July 2010-June 2012

A Social Entertainment Site

• Began and ran Metromix’s weekly tech lunch.
• Wrote a Net::HTTP wrapper for our deals importer to increase timeouts and provide better error-handling.
• Often used math to solve complex problems. A former developer once said “wow, we’d been wanting to do fuzzy matching for a while.”

Volunteer Web Developer – Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema, March 2010-2012

• Updated and overhauled website from static, inconsistent HTML pages to a dynamic CMS (WordPress) featuring online ticket sales, membership purchases, analytics, and social media integration.

Volunteer Technology Chair – Limmud Chicago, January 2008-April 2010

• Managed website, servers, online registration, payment and donation processing.
• Saved money by using free, open source software such as WordPress, Drupal and CiviCRM running on Red Hat Linux.

Open-source software activity:

Maintainer:

• Metric-Fu
• SimpleCov
• Mail
• RMagick
• Rails ERD
• Acts-As-Taggable-On
• YUI-Rails
• Ruby Friends
• Pair Program With Me, Ppwm-Matcher
• Code Metrics
• Code Notes
• Saikuro
• Roodi (during a period it was not otherwise maintained)

Contributor:

• Project to get more licenses specified in gemspecs
• Kaminari
• Rails
• Gems gem
• Code Climate Test Reporter
• Passenger
• Rails Best Practices, Code Analyzer
• Bcrypt-ruby
• Homebrew
• Churn
• Reek
• Sunspot
• Rubocop

Other:

• License missing from gemspec / open
• Other open issues
• Closed pull requests I was involved in

Public speaking:

• Lightning Talk: Gem templates with Thor, at Geekfest 2015-04-07, Post, Code.
• Meetup: Maintaining Open Source Projects, at Dev Bootcamp Chicago Speaker Series (DBCx) 2014-11-06.
• Lightning Talk: Maintaining Open Source Projects, at Windy City Rails 2014, Slides, Clip source, Related: RubyGems Adoption Center Proposal, Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015.
• Lightning Talk: The Open Source Junkyard, at Railsconf 2014, not delivered due to time constraints.
• Speaking: YAML, what is it good for? at RailsIsrael in October, 2013 Slides, Video TBA, Source code
• Lightning Talk: All your OSS code are belong to us, Video at RubyNation 2013.
• Lightning Talk: MetricFu is Back! at RailsConf 2013. Includes discussion of MetricFu, Travis-CI, CodeClimate, semantic versioning, gem versioning, RubyFriends, MrMan, MrSkin
• Lightning Talk: It’s About Time, at RubyConf 2012.
• Lightning Talk: It’s About Time, at WindyCityRails 2012.
• Q&A: Ask Matz about RubySpec (at 42:57) at RubyConf 2012. Not public speaking per se, but I think I prompted an interesting discussion of RubySpec; these things are hard to find without direct links.

Other online presence:

• GitHub: bf4.
• StackOverflow: user879854/bf4.
• Twitter: @hazula.
• Open Source Report Card - Top 1% most active of Ruby users on GitHub.
• Blog: benjaminfleischer.com.

Education:

Relevant coursework:

• Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, 2010.
• Business Requirements Analysis, 2010.
• Agile Project Management, 2009.
• Data Warehousing and Data Mining, 2008.
• Java, and Java Web Applications, 2008.
• Principles of Accounting, 1997.
• Introduction to Programming C, 1996.

Northwestern University School of Continuing Studies, Chicago, IL, 2007-2010.

• Master of Science in Computer Information Systems with a concentration in Database and Internet Technologies.
• Cumulative GPA 3.72.

University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Philadelphia, PA, 1996-2000.

• Bachelor of Applied Science in Biomedical Science and a minor in Chemistry.
• Cumulative GPA 3.29, Biomedical Science Major GPA 3.67 (9 courses).

Other Experience:

• PADI Scuba Diver Certified, 2011.
• Black-Belt Recommended in ATA Songham Taekwondo.
• Director on Condominium Board (2009-2013, Secretary 2009-2011) of 3150 N Lake Shore Drive Condominium. Manage web site and Community Relations & Communications Committee.