Craig Buchek

craig.buchek@gmail.com

314-374-5780

https://craigbuchek.com

https://github.com/booch

Summary

• Software engineer with 15+ years of experience, plus 10+ years IT experience.
• Agile player-coach with a proven track record of mentoring and cultivating talent, transforming teams and team members into the best versions of themselves.
• Experienced Ruby on Rails web developer with strong devops and automation skills.

Highlights

• Continuously improving how teams work - including processes, technical practices, and automation.
• Mentored developers in Agile methodologies and Java programming.
• Active member of developer community, frequently speaking at conferences and local user groups.

Professional Experience

Director of Engineering Excellence at BookTek (2007 - present)

• Managed various projects as an independent consultant/contractor.
• Designed, implemented, and deployed large-scale web applications.
  • Developed, maintained, and documented APIs for several mobile client applications.
  • Contributed to rewrite of a hospital system's patient portal.
  • Wrote application for patients to find doctors by specialty.
    • Developed in 5 weeks, on time and on budget.
• Upgraded and maintained older Rails applications.

Tech Stacks: Ruby, Rails, RSpec, Python, Bash shell, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, HAML, CSS, GNU/Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat)

Staff Software Engineer at DebtBook (2022 - 2024)

• Built web app to manage financial accounting for local governments.
  • Maintained and built functionality for management of public debt, leases, and software subscriptions.
  • Ensured compliance with government accounting standards (GASB, FASB).
• Transformed engineering practices to meet the needs of a quickly growing startup.
  • Focused on building maintainable, reliable, scalable, and performant code.
  • Improved processes, workflow, and automation.
• Promoted advanced technical practices among the engineering team.
  • Provided code reviews, ensuring quality and providing learning opportunities.
  • Mentored junior developers.
• Led several large projects, making design and architectural decisions.
• Grew team from 4 to 25 developers in 18 months.
  • Interviewed and assessed candidates.
  • Streamlined, documented, and automated onboarding process.

Tech Stack: Ruby, Rails, Sidekiq, JavaScript, React, Docker Compose, Bash shell, PostgreSQL, GitLab

Staff Software Engineer at True Link Financial (2022)

• Built web app to manage financial services.
  • Management of restrictions on pre-paid debit cards.
  • Investment tracking for pooled special-needs trusts.
• Promoted advanced technical practices among the development team.
  • Presentation on how to improve testing.
• Resolved issues with receiving duplicate transaction notifications.

Tech Stack: Ruby, Rails, RSpec, AWS, React

Principal Software Engineer at Binary Noggin (2019 - 2021)

• Built web back-end to manage electronic poll books and aggregate data.
• Guided development team to make improvements to processes and technical practices.
  • Agile practices: retrospectives, TDD, pair programming, Kanban.
• Improved application performance, in preparation for traffic spike due to presidential election.
  • Added telemetry/metrics to track performance.
  • Optimized MySQL queries and indexes.
  • Employed background jobs and batching.
  • Tuned Kubernetes settings for scaling pods to meet load demands.
  • Implemented load shedding.
• Upgraded application from Rails 4.2 to 6.0.
• Automated infrastructure build-out.

Tech Stack: Ruby, Rails, Sidekiq, RSpec, jQuery, Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform

Sr. Software Developer at Weedmaps (2019)

• Built web app for a retail marketplace in a fast-growing industry.
  • Management of retailers and products.
  • Categorization and tagging of products.
• Implemented and consumed APIs within a complex service-oriented architecture.
• Promoted Agile practices within team.

Tech Stack: Ruby, Rails, Grape, RSpec, Sidekiq, CoffeeScript, jQuery

Sr. Software Developer at F5 Networks (2017 - 2019)

• Developed web app for network services (load balancers, proxies, DDoS prevention).
• Upgraded web app to Rails 5.0.
• Promoted Agile practices within team.

Tech Stack: Ruby, Rails, Ansible, Nginx, Sidekiq, CoffeeScript, Vue.js

Engineering Manager, Software Engineer at CenturyLink Cloud (2015 - 2017)

• Managed a team of 6, implementing WordPress as a cloud service.
  • Boosted team productivity from 17 to 60 "points".
• Managed a team of 14, deploying Cloud Foundry clusters.
• Built a monitoring system for cloud servers.
• Promoted Agile practices within teams.

Tech Stack: Ruby, Sensu, Grape microservices, Docker, Ansible, Nginx, Bash, Kubernetes, RabbitMQ

Previous

• Designed, implemented, and deployed large-scale web applications.
  • Social networking and data-gathering site for patients with type 1 diabetes.
    • Provisioned load-balanced servers for 200,000 concurrent users.
  • Asset management system for a large company (12 million digital assets).
• Consulted at a large corporation (7000 employees) to teach developers how to implement Agile practices.
  • Implemented pair programming, Kanban, TDD, refactoring, continuous integration.
  • Mentored developers to improve their Java skills.
• Guided companies in establishing technical and process improvements.
  • Embedded within development teams as Agile player-coach.
  • Promoted Agile/Lean methodologies to increase team performance.
    • Instituted retrospectives, pair programming, Kanban, TDD, BDD, refactoring, CI.
• Built an internal cloud infrastructure, automating deployment of Java applications.
  • Implemented web control panel in Python.
• Designed and implemented web applications for small businesses and non-profits.

Tech Stacks: Ruby, Rails, RSpec, Python, Bash shell, JavaScript, jQuery, Java, HTML, HAML, CSS, SASS, F5 load balancers, Capybara, Cucumber, Jasmine, Cucumber-JVM, Selenium, Jenkins, JUnit, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Devise, CoffeeScript

Education

• Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (Terre Haute, IN) - Computer Science major

Community Involvement

• STL Tech Slack - Co-admin
• STL Ruby - Co-organizer
• STL Polyglots - Co-founder
• This Agile Life podcast - Co-host (2013-2019)
• Roy Clay Sr. Tech Impact program - Instructor, Mentor

Conference Talks

• RubyConf - 2014, 2015, 2016, 2024
• RailsConf - 2015, 2018, 2019
• Madison+ Ruby - 2015, 2024
• Blue Ridge Ruby - 2024
• Rocky Mountain Ruby - 2024
• Agile Alliance Technical Conference - 2017