Kurtis Rainbolt-Greene

I’ve been programming for the last 19 years and professionally working as a software engineer for the last 15 years. I have worked at a long list of companies and a wide range of teams: I have worked in “backend” software, “frontend”, and developer operation roles. I have worked on large web applications and small web websites. I have worked as a salaried full-time employee and a contract developer. I have worked onsite, remote, and with remote workers in a significant capacity. I have worked hard to achieve my standing in the programming community by working on free and open source software and mentoring others. I devote my work time to the development of business software and my free time to the art of programming. I don’t use genAI (LLMs or LDM) in any capacity, but I did build a large language model and a latent diffusion model as well as an orchestration layer for those tools. I have an incredible amount of resepect for both product and design.

You can find my Github at https://github.com/krainboltgreene and my LinkedIn here at https://www.linkedin.com/in/krainboltgreene

What I can do

I primarily have experience in Elixir (three years), Ruby (eleven to twelve years), and JavaScript (six to seven years). I have extensive experience with Phoenix, Rails, and a lot of in-depth work experience using React and Ember. I have worked significant with all sorts of JSON-based HTTP APIs including contributing and implementing tooling for JSON:API (the specification and standard). I have a very good understanding of GraphQL. I have a very deep understanding of PostgreSQL, but I have also used and worked in environments with MySQL and MongoDB.

Where I want to work

I currently live in Portland, OR. I am only open to remote work and have been working remotely for six years. I have worked in many remote positions in my career and with remote engineers. I am willing to move to New Orleans, LA or New York, NY.

Who I want to work with

I’m looking to work for a company that matches my ethical praxis:

• Inclusive & diverse leadership
• Non-harmful cultural impact
• Open & cooperative process

I am completely open to discussing what these mean with you.

What I have worked on

I have contributed to a significant number of open source projects of the last 12 years, with these being the ones I think are at least worth mentioning:

• VCR (owner), a ruby network cache that is often used for testing.
• unctionjs (owner), a collection of javascript functions with FP in mind.
• rubygems (core contributor), mainly the CI but also some other discussions about the web API.
• mastodon (core contributor), a federated distributed social network with significant number of users.
• redis.rb (core contributor), a set of ruby libraries for talking to redis.
• ramda (contributor), a collection of functions for FP in JavaScript.
• rails (contributor), a web framework in ruby.
• discourse (contributor), a widely used web discussion forum tool.
• gitlab (contributor), an open source github.

Where I have worked

• Edge Payment Technologies, Inc, first as a Lead Programmer and then as CTO as requied by the company. I managed a group of four people and worked also as an individual contributor.
• TBWA/MediaArtsLabs, as a Senior Backend Engineer for three and a half years. I’m not legally allowed to discuss the details of the things I worked here, but I am allowed to say I worked on internal tooling.
• GOAT, as a Senior Backend Engineer for one year. I worked on making GOAT, all of it’s services, significantly more performant for their high-yield commerce periods, worked on bringing their infrastructure and applications up to date with all the latest libraries, toolings, and framework, whipped into shape their developer on-boarding experience, worked on a “power tool” for their power-sellers that dealt with a high volume of data. I facilitated in the education of my peers while also writing documentation for any processes. I first modified and then eventually refactored the shipping logic, saving/making large amounts of money for the company.
• Laurel & Wolf, as a Senior Software Engineer for two years. I wrote a significant amount of code that is currently running on that platform, including: An advanced matching system, many heavily used API endpoints, an activity monitoring log, ETL tooling, and an advanced coupon/credit/giftcard promotion system. Most of my early work there was in Ruby, but later parts were frontend development in Javascript.
• Dollar Shave Club, as a Contract Developer for three months. I worked to help them transition from their Magento platform to a Rails platform. I largely did conversion tasks and teaching materials.
• Webrand, as a Contract Developer for one year. I built out the entire ecommerce application as well as a tool for designing t-shirts in the browser.
• Nation Builder, as a Software Engineer. My largest contribution was a new permission system that managed who could read, write, and in certain cases “execute” (like send an email) on documents, data, and management tooling. I also built out a prototype system for syncing designer themes into our content management system.
• Makindo, as a Contact Developer. I built out an entire platform and infrastructure for crawling Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and more for information used in telemarketing operations by large car marketing corporations. We built out a data analysis platform and machine learning tool (very primitive) as well as a tool for observing the system.
• iSeatz, as a Software Engineer. I was on the foundation team for the new contract they had with American Express to build their new travel website. Specifically I worked on the initial application and then further on the Dynamic Packaging team. I also worked heavily with the outsourced component team.

I’ve also worked the following places:

• Zinc Made as a Senior Software Engineer.
• Kissmetrics as a Software Engineer.
• Connect For A Cause as a Software Engineer.
• Susco as a Software Engineer.
• Kinio as a Contract Developer.
• DECK Monitoring as a Junior Developer.

What I have been a part of

I have organized or been a part of organizing these events or groups:

• Open Source NOLA Hackathon (2016), where I participated in a hackathon and won second place. I worked on an anonymous distributed social network (twitter like) that worked via Bluetooth device name. Really fun stuff.
• Rails Girls NOLA, a small event of 30+ women getting into software development via fast and loose lessons spanning two days. I was one of the main teachers and mentors.
• Hack Dat, a hackathon that I participated in. I built Bard with three other contestants. We didn’t win, but we had a good time.
• Rails Hotline, a hotline service for people who had Rails-related questions. I received a lot of cool swag for being on the air for the longest time. I think it was around 9 months in total?
• NOLA on Rails, a class I started and ran for a year that gave engineers an introduction course on learning Ruby on Rails.
• Operation Spark, a growing organization that works with at-risk and high school teenagers in the New Orleans, LA area to get them to learn software engineering.
• Operation: Code, a organization that works with veterans to help them get into the engineering market.