Gabriel Elkind

Indie Game Dev

For the past year-and-change I've been taking a pause from web work to found an indie game company. I work for about 8 hours every day focusing on game development with C#, Typescript, Rails, and Unity3D. I've directed small teams of artists, composers, and other engineers to build competition-entry games such as the award-winning Frog Daddy's Dash. Most of my time on this venture has gone towards a large, long-term passion-project which we have not publicly released information about at this time (but I love to talk about them privately!) You can check out some of my smaller game projects on this itch page

Fullstack Engineering Lead

Canix is a seed-to-sale tracking and compliance platform in the Cannabis tech industry. I worked in a fullstack capacity with Postgres, Rails, Graphql-Ruby, Relay Modern, React, Typescript, and React Native. As team lead and first hired engineer, I helped to grow the engineering department to a team of 12 full-stack engineers.

• Helped send our team to victory (1st place!) in TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, the largest international competition for emerging startups.
• Worked closely with the CTO and CEO to develop the product from one used on small, independent farms, to winning 10k ARR contracts from multi-state operators with 100’s of coordinated facilities doing millions/year in sales
• Played a critical role in assessing, hiring, training, planning and managing the first and second wave of engineering team expansion.
• Helped to develop a supportive, positive, continuous-feedback-oriented engineering culture (Scoring 9.1/10 on our internal team satisfaction surveys!)
• Spearheaded the establishment and iteration of team conventions and operations including
• Sprint planning and structure
• Testing and PR protocols
• OnCall engineer rotation procedures and team incident management
• Pre-engineering feature planning/research
• Internal monitoring suites, build integrations, source control protocols
• Oversaw project kickoffs

• Defined, implemented and maintained ~60 (front-to-back) customer workflows.
• Worked 50+ hours a week to develop a performance-critical, full-featured ERP system for Cannabis production and manufacturing
• Built a common library of patterns for our graphql API layer with ruby-graphql and relay-modern
• Created/maintained 30+ complex, reusable React components with stencil examples in order to enable team consistency and fast iteration speed.
• More involved examples included data-streaming dropdowns, SQL-optimized filterable/sortable/selectable datatables, and a form system with configuration-based validation
• Created a white-listed, object-based-permission system for GraphQL security
• Maintained postgres and redis instances and schema, often moving logic to the database and optimizing db high-traffic queries, and measuring/optimizing indices. Made use of advanced postgres features such as functional indices, union tables, materialized views to milk performance out of data-intensive business analytics tools
• Maintained custom API client architecture to optimize access of an archaic, nonsensical government API (a critical bottleneck across our whole platform).
• This used sidekick for parallelism with a token bag pattern and a custom system of transactions to ensure data consistency between our db and the government’s DB (which we did not have direct access to).
• Made significant performance improvements to our most trafficked interactions on a weekly basis with a focus on end-user perceived performance. This was a source of constant output, and I was extremely motivated by frequent positive feedback received from customers

Fullstack Software Engineer

Storr was a fast-paced, seed-stage, social-retail startup. I helped to spec, design, and develop features on a customer facing platform. I worked extensively with with postgres, firebase, Apollo-graphql, Google Cloud Products, react-native, and react all glued together with the most rigorous and advanced isomorphic typescript patterns I've ever used. I chose to leave Storr after only six months because of sudden major changes in leadership and company direction. However, I'm grateful for the plethora of invaluable product, infrastructure, and leadership skills I gained in my short time learning and building with this brilliant team.

Senior Software Engineer

Architected impactful revisions to a complex, data-driven administrative interface written in Ember. Developed reusable components in AngularJS, Angular, Ember and StencilJS used across a large corporation. Designed test and CI infrastructure (Ember, Angular, Protractor, Jenkins) and trained test engineers to use it effectively. Optimized a dev server to speed up application recompilation by a factor of three. Helped to architect a complete rewrite of a complex administrative interface into Angular. Maintained and expanded legacy code written in KnockoutJS. Contributed to a churn-analysis program written in python leveraging markov chains.

Full Stack Software Development Intern

I worked on an elite team to develop “FeatureScript,” an ECMA-like scripting language designed to enable users and 3rd party developers to easily extend OnShape’s platform and UI with custom geometric features. I made many reusable UI widgets, extended a collaborative code app to include collaborative cursors and exposed parasolid functionality to FeatureScript developers by extending the language. In addition, I developed static analysis tools used in our CI workflow, fixed 67 bugs and extended reusable components in our test framework. My work here consisted of full stack development in JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, Java, and C++, and included higher-level architectural decision-making.