Mark Rebec

Senior Software Engineer at Repeat

San Francisco, California, United States

Performed a large R&D spike on the Shopify Developer ecosystem in order to build an MVP Sales Channel App with OAuth, AppBridge, and API integrations to support the core business model. Then helped backport and integrate the MVP functionality into an existing API-only Rails app and separate Create React App frontend, pulling them altogether, upgrading a number of things along the way, and integrating with webpacker, etc.

I picked up a ton of knowledge about the Shopify Developer ecosystem along the way, and developed a real appreciation for the platform and developer experience they provide.

Repeat

Senior Software Engineer

Worked across the stack contributing to AMI, an application for managing todos and contacts for users in affiliate/direct sales. Along with general feature work and contributions to architecture, tooling, infrastructure, etc., there were a few notable projects. I built a chrome extension in typescript to emulate our android/iOS webview wrapper apps, making it easier to develop against those environments without devices. I implemented contact searching with elasticsearch, including custom model mappings/tokenizers/analyzers/etc., efficient bulk importing and index rotation for 20m+ records, custom queries and filters, and a new UI built in react. Most recently I built out a brand new "v2" of our design system (previously all CSS-based) using modern techniques and tooling - webpack/storybook/react/styled-components/etc. - then ported over a bunch of our core components, and integrated it with our existing application.

Maven Technologies, Inc.

The last project I worked on for Hipcamp was with the Data Analytics team, converting their local/development Airflow environment into containerized, managed services on AWS ECS. The entire project and all infrastructure is managed via Terraform, including building containers when necessary, and supports auto-scaling. As a bonus I was able to integrate the Airflow ECSOperator into their workflows, which allows the team to also run and manage the individual jobs in their DAGs as containerized ECS tasks as well as leverage languages other than python.

Hipcamp

Contractor

I was lucky enough to work on a number of fun, rewarding projects while at Hipcamp. Early on I refactored large chunks of our billing/accounting services, introducing transactional record keeping and making huge gains in overall test suite coverage, with lots of reusable RSpec shared examples and contexts. I was also part of a small team tasked with creating a proof-of-concept and eventually delivering our first full product experience built in react and webpack.

As part of an initiative to start experimenting, I built a framework to run user experiments and A/B tests in rails applications, called TrailGuide, which I was able to open source and am currently finalizing for an official release. That work on user experiments lead into a fairly large-scale overhaul of our application analytics and tracking, which included a refactor of our internal tracking library and launching/integrating an ELK stack for our application logs, where I identified and patched a few holes and edge cases causing discrepancies in our analytics platforms.

I also helped influence development workflows, contributed internal tools (scripts, slack bots, etc.), and gave a few short presentations on topics like GraphQL and TrailGuide.

I joined HomeLight in 2017 and began working on the internal sales application. During my time there I helped improve sales workflows, contributed to the Ember JS sales app, and drove some core infrastructure and Rails application improvements. Before departing I rebuilt the internal sales queues, which are used to distribute client and agent leads to sales representatives based on various criteria and scoring, to make it more robust and support dynamic tasks and routing using sorted sets in Redis.

HomeLight

While at Thanx I ​contributed​ ​to​ ​a​ ​few​ ​major​ ​product​ ​features across​ ​the​ ​web​ ​and​ ​mobile​ ​apps,​ ​and​ ​helped​ ​to​ ​improve​ ​development​ ​workflows​ ​and productivity.​ ​I​ ​also​ ​built​ ​an​ ​MVP​ ​Rails​ ​API​ ​+​ ​React/Redux client​ ​to​ ​allow​ ​merchants​ ​to manage​ ​their​ ​own loyalty​ ​campaigns​​ ​for​ ​the​ ​first​ ​time.

Thanx

Blendcast.fm is a pet project started to help facilitate podcast discovery. I never really launched it, and at this point it's mostly just a playground to work in when learning new technologies, testing new versions of libraries like Rails or React, or developing and testing my own gems, npm packages, etc.

blendcast.fm

Creator

As a Senior Software Engineer at ZOZI, I filled lead roles on both the Consumer Product and Infrastructure teams. I helped to plan, architect and implement product features along with the rest of the Consumer Product team, and delivered a number of high-priority projects over my time with the company, including rebuilding the activities search to take better advantage of elasticsearch early on.

Over time my responsibilities shifted primarily towards infrastructure, beginning the move to break out microservices and focusing on developer productivity. This included provisioning AWS infrastructure with terraform, building and configuring base docker images and application containers, using AWS ECS to run those containerized applications, integrating with vagrant for development environments, and a "toolbelt" CLI to tie all the various pieces together and improve developer happiness. Because the team was completely rethinking infrastructure, deployment pipelines and application architecture, I also lead product/application development for many of the new microservices applications.

ZOZI

During his time at Instacart Mark's primary focus was on catalog. His responsibilities included building and maintaining a database of global product details along with pricing and availability data for various retail partners, building out features and tools needed for the team to manage all that data, building an extensive and flexible ETL pipeline for mapping and ingesting partner data in various formats, and work on architecture and infrastructure both for catalog and the larger team/product (like supporting the effort to migrate from Heroku to AWS early on, and eventually breaking catalog out into it's own application/service).

While there Mark helped grow Instacart's catalog engineering team from 1 to about 10 engineers. As the team, the company and the product continued to grow, it became obvious the application architecture was going to need increased flexibility and stability if things were going to keep moving. Before leaving Mark was instrumental in planning and supporting the migration of the catalog concerns out of the main app and into it's own separate database and API/service. Having a good amount of experience in that area, he was able to help avoid some of the common pitfalls and provide some creative solutions for awkward problems during the transition to the new services.

Throughout his time at the company Mark supported the engineering team and production infrastructure by contributing wherever he could, helping to track down and fix difficult problems, improve provisioning and deployment processes, and enhance the development experience by pushing for best practices, introducing tools like vagrant, simplifying the process of seeding data and running multiple services in development environments, etc.

Instacart

OpenLobbies is a side project Mark started in 2012 which aims to provide a way for gamers to connect with each other and their favorite games, across platforms and networks.  Users can build out their gamer profiles, connect their platforms and social networks, schedule lobbies, host tournaments and start or join a group, clan or guild.

OpenLobbies

Founder

As the senior engineer at Graphicly, Mark has helped to build and lead a small team of engineers and is responsible for all high level architecture and implementation decisions as well as infrastructure, application deployments and other engineering support concerns.

He has also helped to mentor some of the more junior team members and works closely with the product team when planning and implementing new features.

Mark architected the current "ecosystem" of applications and services used at Graphicly, which includes a Rails Engine packaged as a private gem to encapsulate all our business logic and share it between applications, as well as the client-facing web app, admin CMS, services API and background workers for processing input documents.

Mark also wrote the current version of the "conversion engine" used by Graphicly to convert various input formats into ePub documents, which leverages a few open source technologies and manipulation of HTML to generate all of the books we process. As a result, he has extensive knowledge of the ePub format as well as the vendor specific variations, such as Amazon's Kindle KF8 format and Barnes & Noble's Nook DRP format.

Graphicly

Initially hired as their only engineer, Mark worked with a small team of contractors to build out the initial version of the application. Over the next year, he helped build out the engineering team in-house and eventually phase out the contractors. Most recently he was responsible for building out the core MVC framework for the relaunch of the application/services, and lead the team in the development of the application on top of the new framework, which is still powering the gdgt application today.

One of the more interesting parts of the framework Mark built is what was dubbed "CacheDB," a no-sql style database/caching layer, based on memcached, which sat between the application and the MySQL database.

gdgt

Mark was hired on as the first engineer at Revision3 in 2007 to build and launch the second iteration of their website and CMS. While there, his responsibilities included building tools for distribution partners, iterative performance improvements on the infrastructure and building a new flash-based video player, among others.

Mark helped build the product and the team at Revision3, helping to make technical decisions, implement new ideas and build out the engineering team that runs the department today.

Revision3 Corporation

As the sole technology resource at Animation World Network for 3 years, Mark was responsible for all web-related aspects of the business. This included maintaining legacy systems, architecting and building all new development projects, managing all hardware and systems and helping manage any outsourced chunks of development. 

The network consists of numerous applications and portals, such as the AIDB, VFXWorld Magazine, AWN Magazine, a Wordpress MU blog network for content creators and a showcase for animation and short films.  While there, Mark helped to bring many parts of the network up to date with current standards and technologies, pushing forward standards-compliant HTML/CSS, video delivery, basic necessities like version control and more for the company.