Rachel Vecchitto

http://www.magnetbox.org
518-573-6498 · Boulder, CO

Summary

Experienced web developer with a professional background in Java, PHP and Rails. Strong design and user experience sensibilities.

PHP, MySQL, Ruby
Designed and built a queue-based system to send listings from about 90,000 Etsy shops to Google Product Search, sending messages from the PHP web codebase and consuming message from ActiveMQ with multiple parallelized Ruby scripts.
Participated in the development of browsing Etsy in multiple currencies, designing and implementing the locale code to manage regional settings and suggest currencies based on location.
Migrated about 800,000 shops from a monolothic Postgres database to MySQL shards, redesigning the schema, t'ing writes, and then t'ing reads to gradually transition to the new database with no downtime.

Ruby on Rails, MySQL, EC2
Lead developer for Wee Web, a website that allows families to share photos, videos and stories about their children, privately and easily.
Designed and developed the site from the ground up with one other developer.
Implemented photo uploads to S3, hosted video uploads with Panda, Facebook Connect, and front-end CSS and JavaScript.

PHP, MySQL, Apache, Google CSE, iPlanet
Served as the development lead for moving the article archive out from behind the TimesSelect paywall.
Led the migration of search on NYTimes.com to the Google CSE platform, creating a flexible, scalable, and uniform search experience across all sections of the site.
As Search Plaform Lead, managed the development and maintenance of all search-related projects, including article categorization, topic pages and general search enhancements.

Redesigned the payment process to accomodate a change from "plus/pro" user accounts to a monthly subscription system.
Built a per-group wiki with change tracking, reversion capabilities, and multiple read/write permission levels.

Guided the development of various features through initial concept, implementation and final release.

Specced and developed a tool to allow groups to easily post ads to Craigslist, leading to over 1,000 clicks to Meetup per day.
Repurposed Meetup's affiliate program to appeal to bloggers and other personal publishers, leading to over 20 new registrations per day.

J2EE, Oracle, Sybase, Apache/Tomcat
Participated in the complete redesign of a centralized web navigation management system, including requirements gathering, UI layout, schema design and object model design.
Responsible for enhancing and releasing an internal web-based project management application, working with users in several departments to coordinate requirements and release schedules.

Java, Sybase, Bash scripting, XSLT, Apache/Tomcat
Responsible for enhancing and maintaining the data retrieval component of a Java-based instrument pricing and risk calculation engine.
Designed and implemented a generic reporting engine used by risk managers on the trading floor that executed stored procedures, processed the output and used XSLT to present the output in several formats.

J2EE, Oracle, WebLogic
Designed and developed modular, scalable web applications using a proprietary model 2 framework.
Was the primary point of contact with the client for a conference registration application, leading a team of approximately 5 developers from requirements gathering through design, development and release.

Servlets, DB2, WebSphere
Designed and developed a text messaging interface using Java servlets for the company intranet, allowing over 300,000 IBM employees to send pages and text messages to coworkers over the web.

Ruby on Rails, MySQL
Sole designer and developer for MountainReviews.com, a community snowsports site with easy-to-browse ski area reviews, member profiles and snowday tracking.