Wes Baker

Senior Software Engineer/Team Lead

Instructure•  July 2018 - Present

As a Team Lead it's my job to balance working cross-functionally with product, design, engineering, and QA, while helping my team improve, and continuing to contribute as an individual.

Software Engineer

Instructure•  May 2016 - July 2018

As a Software Engineer, I spent my days building new APIs in both Ruby on Rails and Clojure, creating accessible user interfaces in React, and leading projects from the first steps talking with product and design, to writing up the stories, to completion.

Chief Technology Officer

EllisLab•  January 2011 - May 2016

- Successfully released many versions of ExpressionEngine, starting from 2.5.0 up to the latest version (3.3.0 at the moment). Created a process and automated manual steps to reduce mistakes made and time consumed to release. Revamped our build script in Gulp which sped up builds by 250%. - Championed and changed our version control system from Mercurial to Git allowing new versions to co-exist with our production versions and enabling faster release cycles. - Refactored outdated and unmaintainable code, in particular our Updater. What was once a 7 step (with many sub-steps) process is now just four simple steps. - Created a deprecation log system to capture and notify our third-party developers about outdated code in their add-ons, letting us remove old and outdated code in months, not years. - Modernized our technical documentation, including improved Docblocks (with parameters and returns fully documented) and similar structures for our user facing documentation reducing the time spent studying the code for both our staff and the developers in our community. - Created our first prototype of automated acceptance testing using Capybara and Cucumber allowing us to spend far less time manually testing bugs, new features, and refactors. - Created an add-on for our application to pull our GitHub Issues into a Kanban Board that’s housed in our intranet. This gave us a visual way to see and coordinate our progress across our many projects. - Established weekly one-on-one meetings and biannual reviews for our development team which helped employees learn where they need to improve and grow. - Wrote many of our release posts and took what was otherwise boring and made it fun and friendly.

Web Developer

NewCity•  June 2008 - December 2010

- Evaluated and chose a new CMS (ExpressionEngine), and trained our staff to use it which led to faster development (and lower costs as a result) and the ability to do much more than we could with our previous tools. - Changed development practices, making an effort to increase our reuse of code and decrease time spent, achieving a 66% savings over our budget in one project. - Updated our source control from Subversion to Git gently transitioning our repositories and training our staff. - Assisted our sales staff with budgeting new projects and assessing potential functionality for clients.