Holly Becker

Email: holly@hollybecker.net Location: Vancouver, Canada

Skills

IT Glue, July 2019-May 2022

Wrote, tested, and reviewed Ruby on Rails code across two codebases using both MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, focusing on database performance.
Main contributor to upgrading authorization libraries, including finding and fixing security bugs.
Regularly presented on technical topics, such as ongoing database changes, and git usage & best practices.
Investigated performance impacts of a major database change and implemented a solution, reducing both memory usage by
30% and support requests related to web request timeouts.
Did regular rotations on support escalations, troubleshooting where the problem was and fixing it for that customer or addressing the root cause, if possible.
Improved developer experience by scripting development environment setup, improving test coverage, fixing flakey tests & warnings, and writing technical documentation.
Onboarded junior developers about our development process, answered questions, and paired.
Promoted transparent developer culture and public technical discussions that everyone could learn from, shared workflow improvements.
Self-organized working on urgent projects during extended management turnover.
Skills: Ruby, Rails, rspec, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Docker, docker-compose, git

Eventbase, July 2018-April 2019

Backend software developer creating asynchronous APIs for frontend and mobile teams.
Wrote & expanded new async Python 3 microservices as part of a project to switch from PHP monolith. Contributed to best practices and shared templates for microservices.
Led collaboration with other teams to confirm API design before starting implementation.
Clarified and expanded out-of-date developer documentation.
Team expert in Python & git, presented git tutorial and organized lunch & learns.
Skills: Python 3, aiohttp, Docker, docker-compose, git, py.test

Artefactual, May 2013-March 2017

Designed and implemented customer-driven features in a small team for an open source digital preservation tool in Python 2.
Advocated for technical and process improvements, including code review, automated testing, upgrading core frameworks and replacing deprecated dependencies.
Documented technical architecture, helped with user docs, and answered community questions.
Skills: Python 2, Django, git, py.test, HTML & CSS, AngularJS
GitHub

Simon Fraser University, 2012

Can I Use that Code? (Conference talk, Slides) Overview of software licences, covering different categories of licences, details of common open-source licences, and how they interact in the same codebase.
Intermediate Git Tutorial (Workshop, Slides) Workshop on using git with other people. Covered forking & pull requests on Github, git remotes, merging & rebasing. Co-created & co-presented.
vcr.py (Lightning talk, Slides) An introduction to vcr.py, a python mocking library for HTTP requests that auto-generates fixtures from live data.
Python Implementations (Lightning talk, Slides) An introduction to the different common implementations of Python: CPython, Pypy, Cython, Jython, IronPython.