Craig Buchek
craig@boochtek.com
314-374-5780
Summary
- Software engineer with 15+ years of experience, with 10+
years additional 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
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
Staff Software Engineer at DebtBook (2022 -
present)
- 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).
- 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.
- Reduced code size and complexity to simplify on-going
site maintenance.
- 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, acceptance testing, 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
- 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
- RailsConf - 2015, 2018, 2019
- Agile Alliance Technical Conference - 2017
- Madison+ Ruby - 2015