Curriculum vitae:
Craig B Kaminsky
About Me
Originally from Washington, DC, I am a web and mobile application developer living in a small Colorado mountain town, called Ouray (population 1000, elevation ~7800 feet). Outside of my professional life, I also coach CrossFit and am a "retired" High School Girls basketball coach. Additionally, I am a member and officer on Ouray's volunteer fire department.
I work primarily with Ruby and Ruby on Rails (Ruby/Rails). Prior to making the switch to Ruby/Rails full-time in 2012, however, I worked in Java and ColdFusion (CFML) for more than a decade. In addition to those back-end technologies, I have extensive experience with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and SaSS.
I spend many hours building relational databases in PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL. I have played with NoSQL solutions, MongoDB in particular, but have not yet had cause to use them in a real application.
I'm also keen on continuing education, especially in the tech industry. Currently, I am actively playing with and learning the following technologies: Python, Swift, and the new Rails stack (Hotwire).
Finally, my work also entails server management. I regularly manage and build cloud-based servers on Rackspace and/or Amazon Web Services. While I am most comfortable with Ubuntu variants, I can comfortably get around most distros.
Education
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2015
Speciality Paths: Rails, JavaScript, CSS, Git
Continuing education classes and coursework completed via codeschool.com, gorails.com, driftingruby.com, pragmaticstudio.com and others. I use these services to keep up on new technologies (Hotwire, ECMA JavaScript, and the like) while also honing existing skills.
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2004
Server- and Client-side Web Programming Certifications
University of Illinois, O'Reilly School of Technology
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1999
Master of Arts, Anthropology
University of California, Santa Barbara. Area of concentration: South Asia.
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1992
Bachelor of Arts, Anthropology
University of Pittsburgh.
Experiences
In early 2015, I broke our monolith up into 4 smaller, more efficient Rails engines. The result has been a drastic increase in performance while reducing the average cost per server.
The new system currently handles assembling, processing, delivering and tracking thousands of electronic newsletters each month sent to more than 3 million recipients.