Mike Hall
Staff Software Engineer
- Location Chicago, IL
- Email mike@just3ws.com
- Web just3ws.com
- LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/just3ws/
- GitHub github.com/just3ws
Role & Career Context
Detailed experience breakdown, architectural achievements, and related archival artifacts.
Open-Source Transition Lead
Hired as a contractor by the founder to lead the open-source transition of the Coderwall developer reputation platform, a Y Combinator-backed professional network for software engineers (856 GitHub stars, 304 forks). Delivered security hardening, proprietary service extraction, infrastructure modernization, and community leadership as the top contributor to the open-source codebase.
- Open-Source Transition & Security Hardening: Led open-source transition for a YC-backed developer network (856 GitHub stars, 304 forks), closing critical SQL injection, XSS, and Symbol DoS vulnerabilities before public release.
- Proprietary Service Decoupling: Extracted proprietary billing engines and scoring algorithms into isolated backend services with clean API stubs, safeguarding business logic.
- Database Migration & Sidekiq Modernization: Executed two-phase database migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL and converted legacy Resque jobs to Sidekiq, cutting operational costs.
Skills: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, ElasticSearch, AWS S3, Heroku, JavaScript, Backbone.js, MongoDB, Vagrant, Travis CI