holsee

The ruby story

Everything tagged ruby across the whole site — work, projects, talks, and writing.

Positions

Principal Polyglot Software Engineer & Architect, Strategic Engineering · Faria Education Group

Nov 2017 — present

  • Originated and architected the company's AI platform: governed, versioned, auditable AI operations consumed by ManageBac, OpenApply and Atlas, across OpenAI, Azure, Anthropic, Bedrock and Chinese providers, with a separate China deployment
  • Built the platform's safety and audit line: adversarial red-team evaluation, an AI-firewall middleware and a byte-level auditing AI gateway; migrated 46 production AI operations across model generations
  • Designed the product AI agent architecture: a role-routed assistant over a fleet of small in-app MCP servers, with a written MCP tool-design doctrine
  • Founded the data platform: a prototype that disproved embedded BI, then a medallion warehouse on S3/Athena/Glue and the Faria Spotlight analytics product, live in three AWS regions; now a second-generation warehouse designed for LLM-grounded analytics
  • Founding architect and tech lead of MiniPD, a coaching marketplace: 14-app Elixir umbrella, Stripe Connect payments with a double-entry ledger, video sessions and chat
  • Built the exam-systems services in Elixir: account linking and messaging, near-duplicate detection realising my own 2018 RFC, conversion services, ingestion pipelines
  • Built a .NET 7 document-processing daemon (DOCX to PDF, table repair, PDF merging) driven from Elixir over a Unix domain socket, and vendored it into the product that needed it in place of a Python and LibreOffice pipeline
  • Polyglot by need rather than preference: Ruby inside the Rails products my Elixir services integrate with, and Ruby client libraries for two of those services; Python for the Airflow and dbt analytics stack I architected in 2026 and for an OAuth2-scoped MCP server built inside a Django monolith in two days
  • Standing roles: AI strategy; founding member of the internal AI Ethics Board; technical advisor to leadership on AI, platform and M&A; hands-on technical due diligence; cross-department consulting architect
  • Pioneered agent-assisted delivery: designed and ran an agentic SDLC, proven by building a complete production-grade product sole-author in 30 days with 1,390 automated tests
  • Owned technical hiring for the division for seven years

Senior Software Engineer, Services & Mobile Platform · NaviNet

Jul 2011 — Jun 2013

  • Mobile platform team for US healthcare: native and web medical applications
  • Next-generation medical-insurance transactions and a composite web architecture
  • Applied programming-language theory to test automation: designed a grammar for automated testing that testers could grow themselves, defining new words in terms of existing ones, an idea inspired by Guy Steele's 1998 OOPSLA talk, Growing a Language