Ship fast build smart scale big.
12+ years in Ruby. Payment systems, search infrastructure, eCommerce platforms, and now AI-powered applications that just work.
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Experience
Wayfinder
Principal Engineer
Feb 2022 – Present · 4 yrs
Principal Engineer behind a K-12 SEL platform trusted by major US school districts.
Wayfinder designs SEL + Life Readiness curriculum for K-12 schools that develops healthy self esteem, belonging, and purpose. Promoted from Senior to Principal Engineer, I own the performant API, enterprise rostering imports, and OpenSearch analytics — and now lead the AWS platform build-out (Terraform + Kamal) and an AI-powered curriculum search.
- ▸Primary backend engineer for 4+ years: 7,249 commits, 1.4M+ lines, 96 models, and 189 background jobs on the K-12 SEL platform
- ▸Architected the enterprise rostering pipeline (8 phases, 38+ jobs) ingesting districts via Clever, ClassLink, SFTP & CSV with soft-delete reconciliation
- ▸Optimized OpenSearch across 5 indexes / 25M+ documents with shard-routing for sub-second analytics; Sidekiq has processed 215M+ jobs
- ▸Built an N+1 detection pipeline (Prosopite + CI) that has prevented 218+ performance regressions; fixed 2,261 bugs over 4 years
- ▸Building an AI-powered curriculum search: hybrid keyword + vector retrieval (pgvector + OpenSearch kNN) reranked by Claude on AWS Bedrock, streamed over SSE and tuned with an NDCG/Recall eval harness
- ▸Stood up the AWS platform in Terraform from scratch — 557 resources across 12 environments (RDS, OpenSearch, ElastiCache/Valkey, Lambda, CloudFront) with OIDC-only CI/CD, per-PR ephemeral environments on Kamal 2, and SOC 2 scanning (Checkov + Prowler)
- ▸Shaped the team AI-assisted workflow: 25 domain agents, 3 Claude-powered GitHub Actions (auto PR review + path-triggered security audits), and cross-repo worktree & automation tooling
- ▸De facto backend lead: authored or reviewed ~78% of all merged code (2,834 PRs) while building the onboarding, docs, and quality gates the team relies on
Flourishing Florist
Founder - Developer
Jul 2017 – Present · 9 yrs
Solo-founded SaaS that helps independent florists double their online sales — live for 8+ years.
Modern florist eCommerce multi-tenant platform. Utilizing Stripe Connect and a custom Stripe checkout flow. Focusing on building a great customer experience and ease of use for store owners. Stores on the platform are constantly doubling online sales each year by improving the site as well as offering suggestions to store owners on how to optimize sales.
- ▸Solo-founded SaaS eCommerce for independent florists — 645+ commits over 8+ years of continuous production (39 models, 55 controllers, 92 migrations); stores routinely double online sales year over year
- ▸Built a Stripe Connect Express marketplace with automated application-fee splits and an 86-handler webhook engine covering charges, refunds, disputes/chargebacks, payouts & connected-account updates
- ▸Engineered PostgreSQL schema-per-tenant multi-tenancy (Apartment) with a custom StoreElevator middleware that routes by branded subdomain and customer-owned custom domains
- ▸Conversion-engineered a 5-step Wicked checkout with upsell bundles (+15-30% AOV), delivery-zone pricing with same-day cutoffs and Ahoy funnel analytics — fulfilled via Twilio SMS and PrintNode receipt printing
CSG Inc
Project Manager - Full Stack Developer
Apr 2018 – Jun 2022 · 4 yrs
Sole engineer of an enterprise audit platform spanning 2,000+ locations and 360k+ inspections.
Built from scratch, backend system for a nationwide janitorial company. Giving the company an overview of their 2,000+ serviced locations by generating customized audits for each location. Over 360k audits completed and over 30k issues were found and quickly resolved. Each audit is dynamic and is completed by an on-site supervisor. Other functionally included custom reports, location issue management, and notifications.
- ▸Sole engineer (708 of 712 commits) of an enterprise janitorial audit platform — 55 models, 41 controllers, 102 migrations — serving 2,000+ locations with 360k+ audits and 30k+ issues resolved
- ▸Built a dynamic no-code audit form generator (JSONB / attr_json; AuditForm → Section → Item) so each location group composes its own quality standards across 7 recurring frequencies
- ▸Architected a self-healing dual-database system pairing PostgreSQL with a read-only MS SQL Server CRM over TinyTDS — auto-reconnecting on dropped links with diff-based ETL reconciliation
- ▸Automated scheduled audit generation and low-score issue triage across 43 Sidekiq jobs, with a pre-computed BI layer powering Chartkick dashboards and WickedPDF/Excel reports
PacaOm
Developer
Jul 2018 – Jan 2019 · 6 mo
Built the video and payments core of a wellness e-learning marketplace.
Wellness e-learning marketplace where I owned the monetization and media stack: Stripe Connect instructor payouts with per-creator fee splits and Japanese KYC, plus a dual-provider (Mux + AWS ElasticTranscoder) video pipeline with resumable direct-to-S3 uploads.
- ▸Architected a dual-provider cloud video pipeline (Mux primary, AWS ElasticTranscoder fallback) for a wellness e-learning platform
- ▸Resumable direct-to-S3 multipart uploads via Uppy/Shrine with async transcoding to MP4/WebM and public + signed (private) Mux playback policies
- ▸Sidekiq job chain (PromoteVideo → SendToMux → MuxWebhook) reconciling Mux asset lifecycle events (created → ready → errored) to lesson state
- ▸Built Stripe Connect destination-charge payouts with per-creator fee splits and full Japanese (Kana/Kanji) KYC onboarding for international instructors
Wyndham Vacation Club
Contract Rails Full Stack Developer
Sep 2017 – May 2018 · 8 mo
Backend for an employee-benefits portal at a major vacation-club brand.
Backend system for Wyndham Vacation Club to manage employees' access to an online benefits portal. Processing of CSV files to manage employees.
- ▸Contract Rails developer building the backend for an employee benefits portal
- ▸CSV import/processing pipeline with in-place editing for employee management
TriQuest
Project Lead - Full Stack Developer
Aug 2016 – Sep 2018 · 2 yrs
Lead payments engineer for an omni-channel fundraising platform (online + in-person + ACH).
Multi-tenant fundraising platform (Rails 5) with omni-channel payments — online card donations and in-person card-present sales via Square’s iOS Point of Sale app — backed by automated ACH bank payouts, encrypted bank onboarding, and PDF/Excel financial reporting across a reseller → org → fundraiser → participant hierarchy.
- ▸Lead payments engineer (292 commits, #2 contributor) on the Doorstep fundraising platform (Rails 5)
- ▸Engineered an automated NACHA ACH payout pipeline with AES-encrypted bank onboarding (CryptKeeper), live routing-number validation and batch disbursement
- ▸Integrated Square Connect omni-channel payments: online card-nonce donations and in-person card-present sales via Square’s iOS Point of Sale app (deep link + WebView callback)
- ▸Built idempotent Square deposit-file reconciliation plus a WickedPDF/Axlsx financial reporting layer with hierarchical role-based access across a reseller → org → fundraiser → participant hierarchy
United League Games
Contract Rails Full Stack Developer
Jun 2016 – Nov 2017 · 1 yr
Fundraising features and a per-user feature-flag system for the FireFan fantasy-sports app.
Worked on the fundraising portion of a fantasy sports application, FireFan. Also implemented feature flag/rollout support to give the ability to turn on/off features to users.
- ▸Contract developer on the FireFan fantasy sports app
- ▸Built fundraising features and a feature-flag / rollout system for toggling features per user
Utah United
Elasticsearch & Backend Developer
Apr 2016 – Jun 2016 · 2 mo
Sole engineer of an Elasticsearch political-analytics engine over 8 years of election data.
A political app where the goal was to determine what precincts in Utah had the highest swing rate. This was accomplished by sanitizing and importing CSV data from past elections and sending them to ElasticSearch. From Elasticsearch we would run queries and filters to calculate the data and visualize it on a map.
- ▸Sole backend engineer of a political analytics engine over 8+ years of Utah election data (2006-2014, all 29 counties)
- ▸Elasticsearch geo_shape (quadtree) indexing across 8,000+ precincts with sub-second hierarchical and temporal queries
- ▸ETL normalizing changing precinct boundaries, 15+ party codes, and multi-method vote counts (14-hour full pipeline)
- ▸Built swing-precinct metrics (DPI/RPI, variability, turnout, projections) with MapBox geospatial visualization
Access Development
Full Stack Rails Developer
Jun 2014 – May 2018 · 4 yrs
Search infrastructure and the Heroku → AWS migration for the largest US discount network.
Core backend/platform engineer across 11+ apps powering a 1M+ merchant discount network. Authored an ElasticSearch indexing service and the `access` Ruby client gem behind a HAL hypermedia API, a native Android white-label app, Appium automation, and SaltStack infrastructure for the Heroku→AWS migration.
- ▸Authored 500+ commits to an ElasticSearch indexing service powering search across a 1M+ merchant discount network — a 15-shard geo-aware offers index with location-context autocomplete and Postgres-trigger change-data-capture feeding 5 priority-weighted Sidekiq queues
- ▸Created and maintained the open-source `access` Ruby client gem — 67 methods over 38 API resources — behind a HAL hypermedia REST API
- ▸Shipped a native Android app supporting 13 separately-signed white-label brand builds from one codebase, plus a cross-platform Appium (iOS + Android) test-automation suite
- ▸Contributed SaltStack IaC for the Heroku→AWS migration (grain-based roles across a 16-node fleet, atomic Rails deploys) and built an internal status dashboard monitoring HTTP, Monit & ElasticSearch cluster health
About
I didn't come to code in a straight line. I started as an audio engineer in Michigan, spent a few years producing and DJing electro house (the high point: Deadmau5 playing his own unofficial remix of one of my tracks while I was on stage), then taught skiing at Deer Valley. The real turn came during a slow summer working a sales job at Best Buy — bored out of my mind, I decided to learn to program, and the moment I found Ruby I never looked back.
That new skill became a new career, and the career became freedom: I could build great products from anywhere in the world. So I sold almost everything, put my Tesla Model S in storage, and spent the next five years as a digital nomad, working my way through Central and South America, Asia, and Europe. Eight months on an island in Thailand turned into a meditation and yoga practice I still keep every morning.
The thread through all of it is teaching and mentoring. Production software, a ski slope, a handstand, a junior engineer's first pull request — the part I love is the moment something clicks for someone else. When I landed in Osaka I started an AcroYoga meetup to find my people, and some of them are my closest friends today. Code just turned out to be the medium that stuck.
Now I'm in Osaka with my wife and a new baby, thirty minutes from a hiking trail one way and the center of the city the other. That balance, deep technical focus next to a real life away from the screen, is the whole point for me.
And I genuinely love this work. Ruby and Rails let me take an idea and have it running in production by the end of the day with almost no ceremony, and after twelve years that still feels like a kind of magic. Lately the ceiling has moved again: I've woven AI into nearly every part of how I build — writing, reviewing, debugging, reading unfamiliar code, and designing the agent tooling my team works inside every day — and it's unlocked a level of performance and ambition I didn't have a year ago. We're at the start of the biggest shift in software I've seen in my career, and I intend to be building right at the front of it.
Coding Activity
Commits per week
All projects combined · each cell is one week
Anatomy of a Request
Pick a question and watch a real, instrumented trace of how the AI terminal answers it — guardrail screen → Claude call → tool execution → final response, each span timed on one timeline like an OpenTelemetry waterfall. These are live API calls (cached up to 60s), not a recording.
Trace
Model answer
Real-User Vitals
This page's own Core Web Vitals, measured live in your browser via the Performance API and graded against Google's thresholds — the same client-side signal a RUM agent collects. Nothing is sent anywhere; it's computed locally, right here.
Live Logs
Structured events from this app, tailing in real time — a miniature of Better Stack's Log Management. Click around or run a trace above and watch the requests land. Only method, path, status, and timing are logged — never your input.
Service Level Objective
A 99.90% availability target for quintinadam.io over a rolling 30-day window, with the error budget computed from real Better Stack downtime — the way an SRE actually watches a service.
Meeting SLO · 0 min downtime used of 43.2 min budget · 30-day window · source: Better Stack
Incident Post-mortem
Pick a real, resolved incident from one of this site's own dependencies and Claude writes a blameless post-mortem from the public status timeline — mirroring Better Stack's AI post-mortems. Grounded in the actual updates; nothing invented.
Post-mortem
Query me over MCP
The same read-only tools this site's AI assistant uses are exposed as a Model Context Protocol server. Add it to Claude Code (or any MCP client) and ask about my experience, skills, or this site's live status from your own terminal.
claude mcp add --transport http quintin https://www.quintinadam.io/mcptools: get_experience · search_background · get_coding_stats · get_skills · get_availability · get_site_status — all read-only
Let's build something worth keeping.
I'm based in Osaka and work remotely with teams around the world. If you're building something interesting, I want to hear about it.