About Me
Daniel Magliola
daniel@danielmagliola.com / +44 (0) 7809 416 604
Current Location: Putney, London, UK
Languages: English, Spanish
Highlights
- Regular tech conference speaker - Rubyconf, Railsconf, Rubykaigi, RubyFuza, PromCon.
- Maintainer of open-source gem with millions of downloads - prometheus-client.
- Technical co-founder of 3 startups - Translator's Corner, HearABlog, Watu.
- Ally and instructor for those underrepresented in tech - Code First:Girls, Women who Code, Rails Girls.
- Published technical reviewer - Multiplayer Game Development with HTML5 by Packt.
- Judge of Algorithms in Microsoft's Imagine Cup international finals for 2006, 2007 & 2008.
Strengths
- Independent, self-motivated, results oriented, and used to learning new skills quickly.
- Excellent communication skills - over a decade of successfully working remotely.
- Outstanding productivity - track record of meeting impossible deadlines.
- Obsessed over code quality, legibility and maintainability.
- Big-picture vision during analysis, forecasting future needs and delivering to that end.
- Strong focus on performance and database access patterns, enabling future growth.
- Ample experience in the development of applications for production environments.
- Strong knowledge of web security and secure code (SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, etc).
Work Experience
April 2021 - Present Senior Staff Engineer at Indeed Flex
Formerly known as Syft, Indeed Flex is a market-leading flexible recruitment platform.
Technologies applied include: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, Redis, Heroku, Datadog.
December 2017 - March 2021 Senior Software Engineer at GoCardless
GoCardless is one of the leading bank-to-bank payment providers worldwide.
Daily activities are focused on our partner ecosystem as part of the API team and internal developer tooling mostly around observability and metrics.
Independently onboarded and improved a large, complex, legacy application purchased by GoCardless. This resulted in it being runnable in production without constant attention, with effective observability and alerting, and aligned with engineering best practices.
Rewrote the open-source Prometheus Ruby client, fixing a problem that had been highly reported for over 4 years that prevented it being used in most production environments. As a result, I became the new maintainer of the gem.
Regularly mentor colleagues and ramp up new joiners. This has resulted in their promotions, very fast uptake of the large codebase, and highly positive feedback both from them and those they worked with.
Technologies applied include: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, PHP, MySQL, Go, Redis, Elastic Search, Prometheus.
Jan 2017 - December 2017 Lead Developer at Watu (Contractor)
Watu was a small startup that developed a multi-tenant SaaS management tool for staffing agencies.
Asked by the other co-founders to return to Watu (see below) for a one-year project: modernizing their legacy codebase to follow recent engineering best practices in preparation for team and product growth.
Owned all elements of the project which included increasing test coverage, adding Continuous Integration, and refactoring a large part of the codebase to follow better Object Oriented design. This led to reduced coupling and complexity, making it accessible to new team members.
Technologies applied include: Ruby on Rails, jQuery, PostgreSQL, SOLR Search Engine, Puppet and Capistrano for deployment, TestUnit and Capybara for automated browser testing.
November 2015 - December 2016 Senior Software Engineer at Appear Here (appearhere.co.uk)
AppearHere is a marketplace that matches pop-up shops with short-term real estate.
Led a small, fast-moving team that was responsible for the whole codebase. This included the customer-facing website, the custom internal CRM for agents to facilitate the lettings, the data processing pipeline for the business intelligence unit, and DevOps / Continuous Integration.
Worked on the entire stack, from the EC2 servers, to the Ruby on Rails backend, to the React frontend to bring features to life.
Technologies applied include: Ruby on Rails v4.2, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elastic Search, AWS S3, AWS EC2, AWS RDS, Amazon Redshift, AirBnb's Airflow, Bootstrap, Foundation, React.
November 2014 - November 2015 Lead Backend Architect and Developer at MSTY
Formed part of the initial team at MSTY, a startup that developed a music messaging app. In August 2015, MSTY was featured as Apple Editor's Choice worldwide.
Single-handedly designed, architected and coded the entire Backend infrastructure, with an obssessive focus on reliability, performance and scalability.
After the initial development phase, I worked extensively on performance, through stress tests and profiling, reaching a sustained throughput high enough to serve 4 million daily active users, with only a single medium-sized PostgreSQL instance, and a response time in production consistently under 20ms (p95).
Features of the backend system include: Messaging and conversation history; Multi-device synchronization; Phonebook processing and matching to find friends; Photo uploading and processing; Music processing: ingestion from music labels (DDEX Standard), automated editing and recompressing; Internal admin tools to manage playlists; Fully-featured Search including searching on lyrics, tags and metadata.
Technologies applied include: Ruby on Rails v4.2, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elastic Search, Heroku, AWS S3, AWS EC2.
December 2013 - November 2014 Lead Ruby on Rails and JavaScript Developer at Gallant Capital Markets
Worked as a contractor for a global leader in online trading specializing in Forex, developing an internal management tool used to keep track of all of Gallant's clients, their finances and their trading.
I took basic requirements from the CTO, did the whole analysis and developed significant functionality through to completion and deployment in production. Also worked extensively on performance, reducing batch process execution from hours to under a minute, and enormously reducing CPU load on the trading servers.
April 2012 - December 2013 Senior Ruby on Rails and JavaScript Developer at Watu
Co-founded Watu, a four-person startup that developed a complete multi-tenant SaaS management tool.
Based on an existing architecture created by my fellow technical co-founder, I created most of the features from end to end working with the CTO, CEO and Designer on UX, analysis and implementation.
The result was a successful product with loyal customers across the UK, Australia, Canada and the USA.
April 2005 - April 2012 Full Time Freelance Programmer - Under the business name "Crystal Gears"
Worked as a freelancer with clients from across the USA and Europe, on solutions ranging from desktop applications to websites and online games. To accommodate growth, hired and coached an additional developer.
Reference Projects:
- FriendShopper: Interactive, real-time social shopping with friends. Has over 15,000 lines of object-oriented JavaScript code and a custom long-polling HTTP multi-threaded Chat Server written from scratch.
- MoverTrends: Sells mailing lists of New Movers around a location in the US. Handles fast geographic queries in a Database with 20 million records.
- GigPay: Escrow system for bands and other performers to make secure transactions. Full rewrite of an original codebase made by a team in India, which had taken 1 year of work, didn't quite work and was full of security bugs. The whole rewrite in ASP.Net, from scratch, took only one month.
- Translator’s Corner: Marketplace for translators and clients to do business online. Advanced and secure money handling to distribute earnings to translators.
2006, 2007 & 2008 Judge of Algorithms in Microsoft's Imagine Cup competition
The Imagine Cup is a programmer's competition sponsored by Microsoft, where students have to solve complex algorithmic optimization problems. In 2006-2008, I developed the infrastructure code for the competitors to work on and test their entries, and acted as one of 3 judges of the world's brightest CS students in the Worldwide Finals that took place in India, Korea and France, respectively.
February 2000 - April 2005 Cimatic SRL (www.cimatic.com.mx)
Cimatic is a provider of consulting and customization services for ERP systems of US company Infor (formerly MAPICS Inc). It is also the official affiliate for Infor in Argentina and Mexico.
Due to the enormous professional growth I experienced working at Cimatic, my roles and responsibilities grew constantly and encompassed the following:
- Provided customer support.
- Visual Basic programmer for internal applications.
- Visual Basic and RPG/400 programming of Client/Server custom applications used by Cimatic's customers, with an "Enterprise Integrator" frontend, and AS/400 backend.
- Systems Analyst and Project Leader, through the implementation of an add-on ERP module that MAPICS Inc hired Cimatic to develop. Usage of this module resulted in a 4% profit increase in the services sector of Schneider Electric Mexico (a 200M annual revenue manufacturing company). The whole project paid for itself in 3 months.
- Consulted on the implementation of this module at companies located in Argentina, Mexico, United Stated and Denmark.
January 1998 - December 1999 Instituto Tecnológico Philips Argentina
Internship in High School Institution were I studied
- Maintained computer network of over 50 PCs for the institute.
- Managed server and hardware repairs for the network.
- Programmed internal tools and Intranet (Visual Basic and ASP).
References
"Daniel is a rare beast, understanding the big picture, technically and commercially, whilst being able to identify and define the minuscule detail that will make the wider vision achievable. Equally adept at designing features and writing complex code, he works at a pace unrivalled. Add to that a great sense of humour and deep knowledge on the weird and the wonderful, he was a great colleague and is now a good friend."
"As a financial solution provider we outsource a great deal of our development work. Our relationship with Daniel Magliola is without a doubt the best outsourcing experience we have ever had.
Daniel, unlike other providers, will take the time to review and analyse each project with us, often pointing out issues and considerations that would have cost us a lot more had they come up during the development. He is dedicated to meeting his deadlines and makes himself available at all hours to support and manage any unexpected problem that arise. I would recommend Daniel to any company in search of a reliable, long term software development partner."
Tag Soup (Languages, Technologies, etc)
- Ruby, Ruby on Rails (8 years of experience)
- PHP (12 years)
- Redis (extensive experience in data structures)
- JavaScript (ECMA 5th Edition, not ES6 and above)
- Limited exposure to Go, Python, Elixir, Erlang and Crystal
- Basic proficiency in Unity
- .Net 2.0, ASP.Net, C#, VB.Net (6 years of experience)
- HTML5 / XHTML / CSS3
- MySQL, PostgreSQL
- ASP Classic, VB5, VB6
- MS SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008
- RPG/400, CL/400, DB2/400, OS/400
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