Nick Babcock
[email protected] | github.com/nickbabcock | nickb.dev | Chicago, IL / Remote
Software engineer with 10+ years of fullstack and tech lead experience. Principal developer of flagship products from startups to big tech. Passionate about upleveling myself and my teams.
Employment
Growth tech lead for new product initiatives with payments and marketing plays for 10M ARR
- Instituted React modernization, Python performance, and streaming upload engine overhaul
- Delivered company-wide conference talks on styling, optimizations, and state mental model
Scaled operations, engineering department, and ecommerce site during pandemic surge
- Architected resilient, serverless product flows for 500,000+ subscriptions in GCP and Node.js
- Compiled site speed audit. Results: perfect CLS from failure, and 2x improvement in other vitals
- Championed error monitoring, CI/CD, code review, and Docker development environment
- Enacted accessibility standards in defense against drive-by lawsuits and $100k’s in expenses
- Initiated adoption of server side Hydrogen React and headless components for LCP performance
Built flagship High Performance Computing (HPC) web portal in Python and React
- Optimized cluster analytic engine 10,000x for world’s biggest customers with Rust
- Cut REST API server costs by 96% in rewrite with Java’s Dropwizard web framework and Postgres
- Wired a suite of application monitoring, alerts, and dashboards with Grafana and Graphite
- Leveraged Postgres for double-entry bookkeeping solution in hybrid cloud accounting
- Grew dev team 5x who iterated on bespoke partner problems within hours
- Implemented reliable ETL pipeline and webhook publisher with RabbitMQ message queues
Projects and Open Source Highlights
- Authored open source libraries with over 2 million downloads in Rust, C#, JS, and F#
- Over 140 technical articles written with several featured on Hacker News and widely circulated
- Dropwizard (8.4k stars): Java web framework core contributor alumnus with 100’s of commits
- Provided consultation services for companies on adopting Rust with Wasm
Education
Bachelor of Science Engineering from the University of Michigan. Graduated Magna Cum Laude in 3½ years while professionally coding near full time. Hand selected by professor for AI competition.