Nick Kaltner

Background

About Nick Kaltner

I'm a Team Lead and Senior Software Engineer with background in devops, infrastructure architecture, usability, high throughput microservices and search! Yep it seems like a weird mix. I'm interested in the full stack, but over time I've realised I can have the most impact is by helping teams become high performance teams. I keep the team focussed on the business problem, not the tech.As a Developer I'm focused on creating better (more maintainable, reusable and well tested) code and/or systems. I am heavily interested in the functional paradigm for a variety of reasons including concurrency, clarity and testability. I currently write Kotlin, Elixir, Scala, Ruby and Javascript in my day job.I have done a lot of analytics and in my spare time I play with machine learning, although right now i'm doing aarch64 assembly for SIMD.At the moment I'm working with AWS based microservices, in a variety of languages backed by rabbitmq and elasticsearch.Previously, my primary focus has been the web. I have detailed knowledge of HTTP, caching, web standards (html/css/javascript), usability, accessibility, load balancing, integration testing and web server configuration. I've built big SOA systems. I understand the problems with handling state. I lean towards Ruby on Rails to develop my web applications, but I understand the limitations of CRUD and will use other architectural patterns such as event sourcing as needed. Recently I've done a lot more with Elixir for things like real time search, real time analytics (14k data points per second on a single host).I am highly creative, and have a strong ability to think laterally and critically about any problems I find. I'm an excellent communicator, and enjoy bridging the gap between developers and the business. Specialties: Ruby on rails, Ruby, Elixir, Scala, Kotlin, Javascript, UNIX, Linux, Solaris, TDD, Apache, Mysql, Postgres, AWS, Apache Spark. I pick up new languages quickly.