Ross Kaffenberger
Summary
- Four years experience developing, deploying, and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications
- Obtained Master’s degree in Computer Science with high standing while working full-time
- Commitment to agile process, test-driven development, and open source
Experience
ChallengePost, New York NY
Head of Engineering, September 2011-Present
- Managed a development team of five across two projects: maintaining, scaling and extending ChallengePost, a platform for government and apps challenges, and building TopicAction, a social platform for collection action (in private beta)
- Extracted a number of opensource projects, including seymour, a Ruby gem for managing activity "feeds" using redis, opensesame, a Rails engine for organization-level authentication, and capitan a Rails app for connecting CI builds and deployments
- Facilitated changes in team development process to emphasize building minimally marketable features, limit work-in-progress and measure impact instead of points
- Refactored core business logic relating to creating and managing challenges, including use of form presenters and state machine
Weplay, New York NY
Software Developer, March 2008–September 2011
- Developed key products contributing to over 400,000 registrations and 30,000 teams created, including media gallery and uploads, game scheduling and event notifications, privacy controls, contests, polling, social network integrations, and color schemes
- Built, developed, and maintained ~50,000 lines of code in Ruby and Javascript, supported by nearly 5,500 RSpec and Jasmine unit tests and 1,500 Cucumber scenarios
- Introduced disciplined Javascript development practices and JS unit and integration test suite
- Implemented site performance improvements, including caching, key-value stores, and Rails query optimizations to cut typical server response times from 800 ms to under 300 ms
- Released multiple open-source projects including map marker clustering plugin and modular rewrite of the “supersized” image javascript slideshow
Cyrus Innovation, New York NY
Software Developer, 2007–2008
- Rebuilt presentation layer for icorrect.com, a celebrity blog website
- Teamed with client developers to deliver online component of classroom intervention tool
The Grow Network, New York NY
Instructional Content Specialist, 2004–2007
- Led content production and design of educational reporting tools for the nation of Qatar to satisfy time-constrained, high-risk contract
- Managed writing and editing of over 100 math and reading web-based tutorials
- Supported product development efforts in designing and building HTML/CSS/Javascript prototypes of educational products for students and parents
YES College Prep & Stonewall Jackson Middle School, Houston TX
Science Teacher, 1999–2004
- As department chair, coordinated vertical alignment of learning objectives, weekly faculty meetings and team budget
- Voted school teacher of the year, 2001, by middle school colleagues
- Founded YES Robotics Club, winner of two state Botball championships
- Raised 8th grade science passing rates from 65% to 90%
Projects
Terraling
New York University, Spring 2011
- Developed a linguistics search and comparison application with input from CS and linguistics faculty
- Oversaw undergrad development, introduced agile and coding best-practices
- Source code: http://github.com/linguisticexplorer/Linguistic-Explorer
Sudokill
New York University, December 2010–Present
http://rossta.github.com/sudokill
- Created multiplayer, real-time Sudoku game using Ruby eventmachine and HTML5 WebSockets
- Produced API for interacting with game, provided support for student developers and hosted online competition amongst participants
- Selected to present project at the department showcase
- Source code: http://github.com/rossta/sudokill
Turfcasts.com
Extracurricular, 2009–Present
- Creator and maintainer of podcast hosting site for story-telling amateur athletes at http://turfcasts.com
Education
MS Computer Science
New York University, Fall 2006 – Spring 2011, 3.85 GPA
BA Molecular Biology
Princeton University, Fall 1995 - Spring 1999, 3.6 GPA
Skills
Programming Languages
I have proficiency in Ruby, Javascript, HTML, CSS, SQL and some additional professional experience with Java.
Software
My professional experience with software includes a variety of version control systems (git, SVN), alternative data stores (Redis, memcached), testing frameworks (cucumber, TestUnit, RSpec), and web servers (Apache, nginx). I have been using OSX for development and Linux for server use since 2007. I am capable with Adobe Creative Suite tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign).
I maintain a blog of my thoughts, projects, and accomplishments in software at http://rosskaff.com. I’m an active member on github and in the New York Ruby and tech communities, nyc.rb and Pivotal NY-Tech.