Billy Cravens

I've built traditional Rails apps, but my strength is in business processes driven by a service-driven architecture, using tools like Sidekiq, Selenium, and more. I've worked with legacy databases and systems, and have optimized massive databases (like a SQL Server with hundreds of millions of records in dozens of tables)

I've been using JavaScript since before it was cool. I was writing dynamic HTML and advanced form validation in the late 90's and early 2000's, before most applications were using JavaScript extensively. When jQuery came around, I began using it extensively. In recent years, I've moved application development to frameworks like React.

I've been writing HTML since the early days of Geocities, when you had to hand code all of your tags by hand. Since then, I've built web sites and application in pretty much every server-side language, and have tried to build websites that correspond to the ever-changing HTML standards. I've converted many Flash projects to html/css as well. I'm versed in a number of CSS frameworks, including Bootstrap.

I've been using SQL in many different databases to solve many different problems for a while. I experienced the pain of using Microsoft Access as a backend to ASP and ColdFusion applications back in the late nineties. I quickly moved to SQL Server, and have been working with it since version 7.0 (about 2000). Along the way, I've built several applications in MySQL, and in recent years, I've used Postgresql more and more. Most of the applications I've built required writing raw SQL, so I'm not hindered by a reliance on ORMs. I also have spent significant time in a DBA role, troubleshooting database installations, slow running queries, writing stored procedures and indexes, and more.

I've been doing DevOps before it was cool or before the term existed.