Nick Farina
Software Engineer in Upstate New York
Work Experience
Made the jump to freelance, and have been lucky to get to work on many interesting projects with great developers through a number of different agencies.
Throughout my experience as an independent engineer, I have led projects development projects frequently involving many parties, such as designers, hardware firms, accessibility consultants, and internal client software teams.
Most of the projects I have managed ranged from 3 - 6 months in duration, and have oscillated between greenfield new development, and maintaining/improving existing code bases. My role typically involves overseeing all phases of project development, from initial planning and requirements gathering to final implementation and maintenance, ensuring that we meet deadlines and hand-off high-quality systems and codebases.
Some agencies I've worked with:
Blackbird Studios (blackbird.us)
Fullsend Solutions (fullsend.io)
An abridged list of interesting clients:
University of Chicago (uchicago.edu)
Swiss Life (swisslife.com)
The Department of Justice (justice.gov)
Solana Foundation (solana.org)
Lineup (lineup.ai)
SCCHA (scchousingauthority.org)
Indigo Agriculture (indigoag.com)
The Information (theinformation.com)
Nursewallet (nursewallet.co)
The majority of projects have been Rails apps, with a Typescript React front end and GraphQL all deployed on Heroku. Recently, I have found myself working more with React Native, NextJS and running servers directly on AWS.
I was an early member of the Warehouse Management team developing inventory and automation software that powers the company’s 3 warehouses spread across the United States.
Worked on a major redesign of our inventory system that changed how our system tracks the location of inventory. This was a large, in place refactor that required a thoughtful implementation to support new and old functionality while transitioning.
Responsible for developing and optimizing the underlying recursive SQL queries that power the logic used to determine the location of a piece of inventory.
Involved in migrating existing batch reporting functionality to be closer to real time using event stream processing with Kafka, co-authoring a Kafka development tool to ease Kafka integration into our ecosystem of services in the process, and established development best practices - now adopted by the engineering team at large.
Technologies used: Ruby on Rails, with Ember front ends with Postgres databases. Redis for some caching, and Kafka (with Rails!) for event streaming.
Starting as a data entry intern for the company, I quickly realized the potential to build software systems to automate existing data gathering and analytics workflows.
Working closely with management, I designed and developed the company’s flagship Watchwire system from the ground up, an automated, complete commercial realestate utility management system, currently accounting for more than $800m in energy spending and 10m mmbtu in usage.
I also implemented the core budgeting service using advanced statistical analysis of nearly 1m data points per account, capable of predicting an electric account’s next-year usage with a confidence interval of nearly 90%.
In my time at the company, the team grew from just me to a team of 3 developers whom I mentored and led through day to day development workflows.
This app was built on the Java Play! framework with Angular on the front end and Postgres for the database, all running on Heroku