Located in Madison, WI
almighty@veez.us
904.238.8439
Beyond the litany of skills that every developer can recite, there are a few aspects of development that are especially important to me:
Testing, specifically test-driven development, is something I’m pretty passionate about. I’ve been a fan of rspec as long as it’s been around, and I love it for unit and functional tests. My first “rock star” moment at my first rails conference in Orlando was meeting Dave Chelimsky. Of late I’ve become a fan of minitest.
Refactoring – in the service of new features – is another thing I’m passionate about. During my time at Hashrocket I was known as the guy who’d take on brownfield projects no one else wanted. Two mantras keep me sane through any low-quality codebase: “do not stare directly into the code” and “leave it better than you found it.”
Ruby is the language I use the most these days. I was reinvigorated upon discovering Ruby; I love writing code that reads like natural English and eschew abbreviations and unnecessary symbols when possible. Ultimately it’s about expressing the most intent to the next developer. Lately I’ve been exploring compiled languages like Rust and Go.
Senior Software Engineer
Weedmaps – Madison, WI
May 2019 to August 2022
As a founding member of the Ads squad, I helped write out and eventually took ownership of the delivery side of our product. Grew the primary ads endpoint to millions of requests per day, monitoring performance and making adjustments both proactively and reactively. Provided a standard API for other squads to enable ads on endpoints they control. Facilitated refactoring our code to match our growing domain language. Oversaw the beginning of the migration from a third-party to an in-house decision service.
Senior Engineer
Adorable IO – Madison, WI
December 2016 to October 2017
Found success for a large project management tool for realtors in the Pacific Northwest, skipping the big rewrite to refactor and rebuild in sections their growing application. Led their development team of three, which grew to eight by the time I left the project, through many performance and usability growing pains. Facilitated and reviewed acquisition of multiple web properties during that time. Also took over development of a react native mobile app, web front-end, and rails back-end for a Madison-based startup.
Founder
Veezus Kreist, Inc – Cleveland, OH and Belleview, FL
January 2012 to May 2017
Continued working solo with clients I met during my time at Hashrocket, developing ruby on rails applications and some lightweight front-ends served via rails backends. Most notably I worked with a small start-up cookbook site with lucrative publishing rights that was ultimately acquired by Macmillan Publishers. I ended up dissolving the firm because I missed being part of a team.
Ruby on Rails Developer (informally, Rescue Mission Specialist)
Hashrocket – Jacksonville, FL and Chicago, IL
May 2008 to July 2011
Met some of the best developers I’ve ever worked with at Hashrocket. The learning environment at that firm is something I’ve never experienced since. Worked on several dozen projects, from a two-week MVP to a major multinational government bidding tool run by an organization in Dubai. Moved to Chicago with the opening of that office and ended up running day-to-day operations. Attended meetups incessantly to grow Hashrocket’s name recognition, and started and ran the Vim Chicago meetup.
If you’ve been linked to this GitHub page it’s because you’re hiring on a team I think sounds like fun. If you have any questions or comments, please do contact me via email or phone at the top of this resume!
Veez