Ben Sterrett

The meat of my experience with Node actually comes from teaching it while at The Iron Yard. In my teaching experience, we worked with all sorts of express-based webapps that used sequelize in some cases, and mongoose in others, to interact with various data stores. I am well-versed in the configuration of node, the usage of npm, and the most confusing-to-newcomers topic, modules. As for the client-side, I've been writing vanilla JS queries, making AJAX requests, and analyzing http headers for quite a long time. I'm well-versed in plain ol' XHR requests as well as promises, ES6 concepts, and DOM manipulation.

I'm currently a backend engineering instructor at The Iron Yard. For a little under 2 years now, I've focused primarily on teaching the Java language to groups of students. The emphasis on the class was web programming, which is definitely my expertise, but we also touched upon JavaFX, a library called LibGDX, and Android. The heart of the class was in Spring Boot, which is a godsend to the Java web development scene. When teaching, I also covered JPA, Postgres/PSQL, H2, Spring Security, Mustache, and DevTools. I taught API design with RestControllers, Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control with Spring Boot, and unit testing with JUnit.

Before I became a Java instructor, I spent several years as a .NET developer, writing both Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC code. I have worked on and deployed quite a few large-scale ASP.NET projects, and know the ins-and-outs of IIS, Web.configs, the C# language, you name it. I'm the creator of the CSharp port of the Imgix Client Library.

I have written very many web applications, and have seen very many edge-case bugs. I am very familiar with basically every aspect of client<->server interaction. As the backend developer in my previous positions, I've basically been tasked with "figuring out the hard stuff," which is something I love to do. When a thing is asked, I am not satisfied until I arrive at a conclusive answer. This often means looking at stack traces, http status codes, http packet headers, and browser documentation. I love finding solutions to difficult web-problems.

I have spent many years writing SQL for business applications, and a couple years teaching it. I can speak to the importance of referential integrity, as well as striving for third normal form in your tables. I can analyze business needs, sort out the multiplicity of entity relationships, and create the tables to support them. I can write and explain Joins and aggregate functions in a multitude of SQL Engines.

I deploy basically everything I do to Heroku. Be it a node project, rails project, or Java project, I have used Heroku extensively to deploy my web applications. I've initialized, configured, and scaled my apps all through the heroku cli, and can walk through each step of deploying any app.

Git is one of my favorite tools. I use git in every project where I have a say in the source control mechanism. I have taught seminars on git, established entire DevOps workflows around git, and have been the resident git expert in my office for the past several years. I can guide people through difficult merges, establishing branching strategies, and interactive rebasing. I can explain how to setup post-commit hooks, how to configure a bare repository to deploy their code, or establish remote upstreams.