Mar 2016 – Apr 2020 · 4 yrs 1 mo · Greater Seattle Area

Sep 2014 – Mar 2016 · 1 yr 6 mos · Seattle, WA

Aug 2012 – Sep 2014 · 2 yrs 1 mo · Seattle, WA

• OSS development work on the Ruby and Rails core teams. I fix bugs in Ruby or Rails that the team finds, improve performance of the Rails framework, and maintain tools for increasing programmer productivity. My main focus is on Rails internals, where I was able to increase performance in ActiveRecord by 100%.

Jun 2010 – Present · 15 yrs 11 mos

• I work on various parts of Rails internals. My main goals are increasing developer productivity by fixing bugs, improving performance, or adding common features. Most bugs and performance issues are found through applications at companies where I work. One highlight of the performance work I've done is a project called "Adequate Record" which increased performance of "ActiveRecord" by 100%, and reduced object allocations by 70%. Other improvements include speed improvements on the query generation library (ARel) and controller / view performance improvements.
• I am also a Rails release manager, so in addition to maintaining and improving Rails, I also manage releases. This includes determining which bugs to backport, creating the releases, and ensuring people are notified of the release.
• Finally, I am on the Rails security team. My duties include responding to security reports, judging impact, fixing them, and finally releasing fixes. I also work with Linux distributors to make sure the patches are applied in Linux distributions.

Oct 2009 – Present · 16 yrs 7 mos

• Maintain various libraries in Ruby's standard library including "psych" the YAML parsing library and "fiddle" a wrapper around libffi. My work on the Ruby Core team is mostly done in Ruby and C.
• I am on the Ruby security team. Duties here include assessing and responding to security reports, judging impact, and communication with Linux distributors.

Feb 2009 – Aug 2012 · 3 yrs 6 mos · Seattle, WA

• OSS development work on the Ruby and Rails core teams. This work included bug fixes, performance improvements and handling security issues.

Jan 2009 – Present · 17 yrs 4 mos

• I speak at various conferences around the world, including a keynote speaker at RailsConf for the past 4 years. I have keynoted at conferences including mountain.rb in Colorado in 2009, RubyConf Uruguay in 2011, RubyKaigi in 2012, as well as many others.
• 29 of my talks are recorded here (keynotes and others):
• http://www.confreaks.com/presenters/21-aaron-patterson

Nov 2006 – Feb 2009 · 2 yrs 3 mos · Seattle, WA

• Ruby on Rails application developer. Worked on the AdReady website and various other systems related to the business. The work I did included major user facing features as well as back-end improvements like performance and scaling.

Jan 2001 – Nov 2006 · 5 yrs 10 mos

• Senior Software Engineer. I wrote and maintained applications that are used on the Classmates.com website. Applications included major user facing features, Apache filters for delivering targeted content to users, among other things. I also worked with the database team to speed up the website, as well as building various caching systems.

Aug 1999 – Jan 2001 · 1 yr 5 mos

• Working on the Vehix.com website using mod_perl, C which was backed by Sybase and MySQL databases. My responsibilities mostly included working on developing new features for the website as well as working on programs that fetch car inventory data from partner dealerships.