June 2013 Norwood Abel

07971269282
Noorwood.Abel@gmail.com London, SE8

Summary:
I am a quality focused web developer, I enjoy solving hard problems in an elegant and maintainable fashion. I am passionate about the web and open source software, and feel that while we have gone some way to solving the problems of the web, there is still some way to go. While working almost exclusively with PHP for a number of years, I have slowly repositioned myself as a full stack developer. Primarily I work with Ruby as a server side language, but am comfortable with several more. I am equally happy on the front or the back end of a web application, and I am able to context switch between the two happily.

Skills
Ruby, Rails, Sinatra Agile, Scrum JavaScript/CoffeeScript Node.js HTML, CSS, LESS, SASS, SCSS MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis Rspec, Test/Unit, Shoulda, Jasmine, qUnit PHP

Experience
Goals for Giving - 08/12 05/13 Chief Developer I inherited a hastily developed Rails application created by a short term contractor. Over the next four months I almost completely refactored the existing codebase and added new functionality in a maintainable and testable manner. After several months it became clear that we needed to reposition ourselves, and I then built a customizable, extendable and scalable advertising platform, using a combination of Backbone.js and Sinatra while using Jasmine and Rspec as test frameworks. Using Async::Sinatra and MongoDB this application was able to easily scale to >50k unique users per day using just one Heroku dyno for any server side work needed. Technologies Used

Resume:

Ruby, Rails, PostgreSQL, Sinatra, MongoDB, jQuery, Nodejs, Rspec, Jasmine, Backbone.js.

Videojuicer - 01/10 08/12 Ruby Developer My first project was refactoring and updating our in house management panel, this was perfect for my skill-set, as it involved both server and client side work. For the backend we continued to use Merb, on the front end we moved to a similar architecture to a what would now be a backbone.js application. On completion of this product, I then moved into and later lead the integration team. My main focus was to manage and develop solutions for the several clients Videojuicer technologies would need to work in tandem with. I developed some client side only applications, a CMS and successfully managed to integrate the amazon product advertising api into a flash video player extension. In addition to this, I inherited some legac y codebases created by external contractors, I maintained and extended these products in parallel to my other work. I was often drafted in work on the Videojuicer core api, which served all embed codes and provided an easy introduction into scaling large ruby applications.

2
Technologies Used: Ruby, MERB, Sinatra, Rspec, EventMachine, JQuery, Rails, Git, JavaScript, Jasmine, Scala.

TMGC - 01/09 11/09 Web Developer Main Duties: All front end development, ranging from user interface design to api access layer.Setup and maintenance of all servers.All internal systems administration duties, including managing all git/svn repositories and supervising backups of all office data. Technologies Used: PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, JQuery, Ajax, JSON, Memcached, Ubuntu, Shoulda, Factory Girl.

Lead Galaxy - 07/08 01/09 Senior Web Developer Main Duties Maintaining and updating an existing PHP 4 based property management system.Maintaining in house Rails applications.Developing and maintaining the in house ruby based API.Designing Sites, Banners, and Advertisements.Projects Deployed:New version of the in house api engine.Statistical analysis package built in Ruby on Rails. New version of the main lead generation system redeveloped using CodeIgniter. Technologies Used: PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, FreeBSD, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, jQuery/Prototype

Base Creative - 07/07 07/08 Web Developer Main Duties: Developing a generic and reusable Website Management System. Building Ajax and Google maps web applications/mashups. Developing e-commerce based systems that work in a modular fashion. Creating and maintaining a sub set of xml to use as a template language. Projects Deployed: Version 1 and 2 of the CMS (still in use today 12/09). Bugfixes to several externally developed rails applications. Many client websites built from the CMS, or using modules from it. Technologies Used: PHP/Mysql, Xml/Xslt, JSON, cakePHP. jQuery/Prototype

Resume: