His mission

(he chose to accept it)
Help people write code and tests others can easily understand

Recent Deployments

Speed
Rails performance
Technical debt
Legacy rescue
Robot
CI/CD pipelines
Quality
Test suite health

Tools & Tradecraft

Ruby/Rails

Saxophone

AWS/DevOps

Herding cats/other engineers

Clojure

Noteworthy Achievements

Delivered a system to convert millions of records each with hundreds of fields from pipe-delimited-values into a SQL database attached to a Rails app
Implemented a custom Rails caching layer to serve frequently updated and personalized data at a rate of 6000 requests per minute
Helped introduce a culture of pair programming and frequent retrospectives to a team that had been previously unsuccessful adopting those practices
In order to facilitate updates to a Third-party API, extracted complex calls/instructions to that API into an independently tested Gem

Reports from the Field

  1. How I doubled the speed of a driving directions API

    One of our clients came to us with a problem: Our app feels too slow. We’ll break down how we were able to make one of many specific performance improvements to double the speed of the app.
    Time An icon of a clock Publish Date
    February 6, 2024
    Person An icon of a human figure Authors
    Kevin Baribeau
    Category An icon of a paper organzier Categories
    Consulting
    mobile
  2. What happens when you extract a function anyway?

    Imagine you’ve got this snippet of code: (If this looks scary, try reading the original code from testdouble.js—I’ve made some changes to it here that make it a bit uglier)
    Time An icon of a clock Publish Date
    May 28, 2019
    Person An icon of a human figure Authors
    Kevin Baribeau
    Category An icon of a paper organzier Categories
    JavaScript
  3. Do we need dependency injection in Ruby?

    What is Dependency Injection anyway? Do we need it at all in ruby? We'll go over a small example and review how being familiar with DI can lead to a better design.
    Time An icon of a clock Publish Date
    May 17, 2018
    Person An icon of a human figure Authors
    Kevin Baribeau
    Category An icon of a paper organzier Categories
    Ruby
  4. The git sledgehammer

    Completely lost in a nasty git merge conflict? Here's what you do...
    Time An icon of a clock Publish Date
    October 20, 2017
    Person An icon of a human figure Authors
    Kevin Baribeau
    Category An icon of a paper organzier Categories
    Development
  5. An empathetic guide to Git conflicts

    We’ve all seen this story. You’ve worked hard on some cool new stuff and are ready to push, but the universe has other ideas. BBZZZT! Conflict! What do you do?
    Time An icon of a clock Publish Date
    January 25, 2016
    Person An icon of a human figure Authors
    Kevin Baribeau
    Category An icon of a paper organzier Categories
    Process

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