drellow / cv

Hi. I'm a programmer, designer and musician living in the sometimes-sunny Mission District of San Francisco, California.

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Christopher Drellow

Senior Software Developer in San Francisco, California

Email | GitHub | Spotify

Recent Work

Senior Software Engineer @ Verba Software (March 2015 - Present)
Full stack Rails developer on a team dedicated to making learning materials more affordable and accessible to students.

  • Verba Connect / Inclusive Access
    Instrumental in architecting and creating a tool in a matter of weeks that would go on to revolutionize digital textbook distribution.
  • Nebraska Sourcing Integration
    Worked closely with third-party logistical partners to develop an API integration workflow which allowed for millions of dollars of learning materials to be tracked efficiently from purchase, warehousing, collection and end-user shipment.
  • Stability and Escalation Workflow Management
    Worked directly with customer service teams to improve efficiency and efficacy of On-Call engineering rotations and management of production errors from background jobs to customer experiences.

Software Engineer @ University Now (March 2013 - March 2015)
Full stack Rails developer building a world-class online learning platform. Worked closely with a team of developers, educators, and visionaries to change the world of online higher education.

  • Enrollment 2.0
    Lead a team in an effort to reconstruct our student onboarding process. Ensured timely project completion. Architected a new structure for the system including new routing and object model. Worked closely with internal user experience designer.
  • Readiness
    Built a system that monitors a student's progression through learning material and provides up to the moment feedback, showing them when they are ready to take their exams.
  • Course Plans
    Backbone application hosted on Rails. Allows course designers to dynamically plan and share course learning materials. Supports multiple dependent objects and automatic persistence to the server.

Familiar Technologies

  • Ruby
  • Rails
  • React
  • Heroku
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • PostGres
  • MySQL
  • Javascript
  • Backbone
  • ActiveRecord
  • jQuery
  • HTML / ERB / HAML
  • HTML5 / Canvas
  • Pusher / Websockets
  • CSS / SCSS / SASS
  • RSpec
  • Factory Bot
  • Devise
  • REST
  • Git

Personal Projects

Glumdark

  • Content platform for pre-generated and randomized tabletop roleplaying content. Rails backend with a Stimulus frontend.
  • Focus is on a clean, useable and mobile-friendly design which can be easily nagivated and used during roleplaying game sessions.

The TQ

  • Social networking site that allows friends and acquaintances to learn more about each other. Moderators post daily thought provoking questions. The answers are sorted along the logged-in user's social graph via Facebook integration.
  • Answers can be voted upon and commented upon as well. The app is gamified with a scoreboard that is dynamically built from user interaction.
  • No longer running, but it was fun briefly.

CTRO | Bells Rang | Fellow Wolf | etc.

  • Recorded, engineered, mixed, and produced several records.
  • Performed dozens of lives shows with multiple musical acts.
  • Spent countless amounts of money on drum machines and synthesizers.

Past Work

Lead Designer @ CLAW (2012)
Developed gameplay mechanics and visual style for Election War Room 2012 for iOS. Worked from pen and paper gameplay to a polished and fully functional game in 8 months.

  • Designed gameplay, visual style, and user interface. Employed swift iteration to move from physical mockups to wireframes and eventually the mobile platform.
  • Worked daily with project lead and engineer. Maintained constant communication to develop daily goals and accomplishments and continually push project towards completion on an optimistic deadline.
  • Working with a small team, employed a diverse toolkit to deliver visual needs. This included illustration, icon design, user interface design, user experience, animation, and character design.

Co-Founder & Game Developer @ Good Controller (2011)
Co-founded a video game development company. As a two person team with no initial experience in the industry, we developed a finished product in just over a year. Our game was featured by Apple and distributed to tens of thousands of mobile customers.

  • Worked closely with product engineer to develop user interface assets.
  • Developed a UI style and voice specific to the project.
  • Designed top to bottom user interface, including all written and visual content.
  • Maintained visual and written style throughout all brand messaging,
  • Created visual assets, including character models and in-game content.
  • Produced all game audio from sound effects to music performance and engineering.
  • Performed all marketing and promotional tasks including content writing.
  • Developed online presence and cultivated social media awareness.

Languages Spoken

English: Native, and quite good.
French: Iffy at best.

Education

Rhode Island School of Design - Product Development & Manufacturing
RISD - Online / Providence, RI (2020 - Present)
App Academy - Bootcamp / Code School
App Academy - San Francisco, CA (2013)
State University of New York at Buffalo - Comparative Literature and Journalism
SUNY Buffalo - Buffalo, NY (2007)

About

Hi. I'm a programmer, designer and musician living in the sometimes-sunny Mission District of San Francisco, California.