Joshua Ashby

This page is also available as a a PDF.

I’m a full-stack developer with broad experience in web, mobile and data engineering. I’m a quick and enthusiastic learner of new technologies and code bases; Plus I am always looking for new opportunities for continued growth. I’m experienced with being in knowledge leadership roles and I’m comfortable working collaboratively or on my own.

Primary Technologies: Server Side Swift, Elixir/Phoenix, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, JavaScript/TypeScript, NodeJS, ReactJS, Svelte, Redis, SQL/PostgreSQL/SQLite/Snowflake, Python, DBT, Elasticsearch, CSS, Bash, Terraform

Comfortable Tools & Platforms: Git, Fossil-SCM, Terraform, Heroku, AWS, Digital Ocean, Fly.io, Ansible, Chef

Notable Work

• As a consultant and contractor, I’ve helped teams refactor and architect large TypeScript/React and Elixir/Phoenix code bases to reduce operational costs and risk of mistakes, and increase developer speed and product alignment.

• I architected and developed an extensive in-house ETL framework in Ruby, that transformed data from a number of sources including Elasticsearch, Postgres, Google Sheets, External APIs and Redis into a data lake stored in AWS Redshift.

Professional Experience

• Maintained a Dagster and DTB powered Data Pipeline working against Snowflake and AWS resources.

• Discovered and implemented optimizations for an expensive data model, which reduced build times from 6 hours to 20 minutes. This cut our database compute costs by over $30,000 per year (approximately a 50% reduction per year) and greatly improved the developer experience.

• Architected a centralized, uniform strategy and tooling for ingesting external, multi-formatted insurance data using Snowflake Snowpipes and Parquet files, reducing the time and effort required to operationalize new data from our partners from a week to 45 minutes, while increasing confidence in the data’s integrity.

• Lead an initiative to consolidate a business critical identification service out of an unmaintained Ruby on Rails app and into our existing Python/Dagster project with zero downtime. This increased the operational speed and accuracy of identifying and correcting problematic duplicates.

• Supported a React Native mobile app project, with a focus on a ReactJS administrative panel and NodeJS GraphQL API.

• Mentored developers on topics including systematic approaches to debugging, breaking product requirements down into manageable units of work and working with product partners to help maximize the realized value of work.

• Implemented a workflow for migrating complex, dynamically generated forms out of a deprecated Meteor app’s MongoDB database and into a Postgres database. Additionally, I helped build an administration panel in React to author new forms, and implemented Elixir modules to render them on a GraphQL endpoint for consumption by a separate React app. This reduced the client’s time required to onboard new contracts from multiple weeks to a few hours.

• Maintained multiple Elixir/Phoenix projects, including a greenfield application, and one open-source library for integrating Elasticsearch with Ecto models.

• Maintained and implemented new features in several React projects, including a React Native mobile application.

• Managed DevOps on AWS and Heroku infrastructure with Terraform.

• Mentored developers on TypeScript/ReactJS and Elixir/Phoenix paradigms.

• Developed a browser extension for Chrome using React/TypeScript that was backed by an API built with Python 3 and Flask. The client, a marketing and customer success company, used this extension to manage multiple customer accounts at once by allowing individual browser tabs to use different virtual cookie stores, and thus different multiple different logins for a single site at the same time. It also provided a number of additional tools such as generating links with preset UTM parameters, and storing/copying custom text shortcuts to the clipboard.

• Migrated and modernized a PHP 5/Drupal/MySQL project to Ruby on Rails 6 with Postgres.

• Partnered with Gloo to continue supporting the ETL.

• Built out a data ingestion pipeline and reporting application with React, NodeJS and AWS Lambdas subscribed to AWS SQS events from S3 & external systems to support a client’s need to identify locations for expansion.

• Principle engineer of a Ruby based ETL which maintained a Star-Schema normalized data warehouse that account managers and leadership used to report on customer engagement and platform health. The ETL incorporated a number of sources including Elasticsearch, Postgres, Redis, AWS Redshift, Google Sheets and External APIs.

Thanks to Feather Icons and IBM Plex Sans which I use in the PDF version of this page.