About

My name is Jake and I have been developing software for about 6 years now. The last ~5 years of that were at a startup working on a product for the vacation rental industry using Ruby on Rails and React. I’m writing this blog to explore technical topics that are new to me and solidify my understanding of topics I am familiar with.

I was exposed to programming in my college years as a Linux user and through a music technology course while I was earning my Bachelor’s of Music degree at the University of Utah. After a few years playing bass as a freelance musician I chose to attend the DevPoint Labs web development bootcamp in Salt Lake City, Utah where I learned to write web applications.

My first tech job was as an intern with Salt Lake County and I got my first full-time job as a Full Stack Software Engineer at Direct Software soon after. While there I:

• added tons of features to a legacy codebase
• influenced the team to follow best practices like writing unit tests
• learned to prioritize when faced with bugs affecting functionality and customer experience
• helped build the engineering departments practices and culture by establishing our processes for things like code review and deployment
• learned how to measure and improve the performance of Rails applications and used that knowledge to reduce the memory use and latency of our application
• received a promotion to Senior Software Engineer

I was unfortunately laid off from that role recently and am seeking a new software developer position. Please reach out via email at contact at jakebills dot com if you need an experienced engineer with skills including Ruby, Javascript, Rails, and Postgres.