CV • Sergey Pedan

Back-end, front-end, team lead, and web designer. Ruby on Rails developer since 2015, worked as a web designer for many years before that.

Slowly learning Rust. Building an online code school. Born in Moscow, currently living in Argentina. Lived 5 years in total since 2012 in Thailand and love it tenderly.

10.2 yr writing Ruby
11.0 yr writing JavaScript
22.2 yr writing HTML / CSS
11 yr practicing web design
13 yr doing remote work

Contact me via: GitHub GitLab LinkedIn Gmail Telegram

Main technologies

Back end

Slim • Competence: 9 • Used in 20 projects
Ruby on Rails • Competence: 9 • Used in 23 projects
ActiveAdmin • Competence: 8 • Used in 14 projects
Devise • Competence: 8 • Used in 15 projects
Ruby • Competence: 8 • Used in 24 projects
Telegram Bot API • Competence: 7 • Used in 1 project
ViewComponent • Competence: 7 • Used in 4 projects
GraphQL / Ruby • Competence: 6 • Used in 2 projects
Sidekiq • Competence: 5 • Used in 11 projects
Haml • Competence: 5 • Used in 3 projects
dry-validation • Competence: 5 • Used in 2 projects
Sinatra • Competence: 4 • Used in 1 project
OpenAPI • Competence: 4 • Used in 1 project
Bash • Competence: 4 • Used in 7 projects
Rust • Competence: 2 • Used in 0 projects
RabbitMQ • Competence: 2 • Used in 0 projects
GoodJob • Competence: 2 • Used in 1 project
Python • Competence: 1 • Used in 2 projects

Front end

Bootstrap 3+ • Competence: 9 • Used in 16 projects
Flexbox • Competence: 9 • Used in 9 projects
CSS • Competence: 8 • Used in 35 projects
HTML • Competence: 8 • Used in 32 projects
Sass • Competence: 8 • Used in 25 projects
jQuery • Competence: 8 • Used in 20 projects
Vue • Competence: 7 • Used in 5 projects
Chrome extensions • Competence: 6 • Used in 1 project
Data Tables • Competence: 6 • Used in 2 projects
JavaScript • Competence: 6 • Used in 26 projects
Microdata • Competence: 6 • Used in 3 projects
React • Competence: 6 • Used in 5 projects
WebPack • Competence: 6 • Used in 7 projects
Stimulus • Competence: 5 • Used in 3 projects
HotWire • Competence: 5 • Used in 3 projects
d3 • Competence: 5 • Used in 2 projects
Tailwind CSS • Competence: 4 • Used in 1 project
Webpacker • Competence: 4 • Used in 4 projects
Svelte • Competence: 2 • Used in 0 projects
TypeScript • Competence: 2 • Used in 1 project

DevOps

Heroku pipeline • Competence: 9 • Used in 3 projects
Heroku dynos • Competence: 8 • Used in 15 projects
DigitalOcean droplets • Competence: 8 • Used in 5 projects
AWS S3 • Competence: 8 • Used in 11 projects
Docker • Competence: 7 • Used in 9 projects
Capistrano • Competence: 7 • Used in 6 projects
Fly.io • Competence: 6 • Used in 2 projects
Chef • Competence: 4 • Used in 3 projects
Kamal • Competence: 3 • Used in 2 projects

Database-related

PgAdmin4 • Competence: 7 • Used in 4 projects
SQL • Competence: 6 • Used in 23 projects
SQLite • Competence: 5 • Used in 4 projects
Postgres • Competence: 5 • Used in 6 projects
Redis • Competence: 4 • Used in 9 projects
MySQL • Competence: 4 • Used in 2 projects
ElasticSearch • Competence: 3 • Used in 1 project

QA

RSpec • Competence: 9 • Used in 17 projects
LightHouse • Competence: 8 • Used in 2 projects
GitHub • Competence: 8 • Used in 26 projects
Git • Competence: 8 • Used in 25 projects
Capybara • Competence: 7 • Used in 18 projects
GitLab • Competence: 6 • Used in 10 projects
Circle CI • Competence: 5 • Used in 3 projects
GitHub Actions • Competence: 3 • Used in 1 project

UI / UX

InDesign • Competence: 9 • Used in 5 projects
Affinity Designer • Competence: 9 • Used in 7 projects
Photoshop • Competence: 8 • Used in 13 projects
Illustrator • Competence: 8 • Used in 11 projects
Balsamiq • Competence: 8 • Used in 0 projects
Invision • Competence: 7 • Used in 1 project
Figma • Competence: 6 • Used in 4 projects
Flash • Competence: 5 • Used in 2 projects
Sketch • Competence: 3 • Used in 3 projects

No-code & low-code

WebFlow • Competence: 2 • Used in 1 project

See my level of experience with these and other technologies

Previous jobs

Ruby developer, UI designer and tech lead at Speed & Function

April 2021 — till present

This job was fully remote.

Speed & Function

Employer

An outsource agency, “Technology Organization as a Service”. ~100 employees. Have released over 300 products in over a decade.

On the path of “Deliberately Developmental Organization”. Listed in Teal organizations in Ukraine hall of fame.

Typical Back end tasks

Upgrading gems in legacy Rails projects
Creating service objects for performant filter search
Rewriting controllers to reduce the number of SQL queries & lower DB utilization
Creating & deploying Ruby on Rails web apps from scratch
Authoring background jobs for Sidekiq
Customizing forms & index layouts in ActiveAdmin
Integrating data from API providers
Authoring purchase flows
API design
Refactoring legacy code
Re-writing pages from ActionView partials to ViewComponent
Developing a home-grown CMS / admin area
Upgrading Rails from previous versions
Creating Rails API back-ends for React

Typical Front end tasks

Rewriting clumsy legacy HTML into correct, consise, semantic HTML that looks beautiful even with no CSS
Front-end develpment (HTML / CSS /JS)
Setting up asset build pipeline via Webpack, ESbuild, Parcel etc.
Building charts in d3
Web page performance optimization
Adding responsiveness to legacy pages
Making heavy parts of web pages asyncronous via Ajax
Replacing Datatables with HotWire
Creating web animations with CSS
Creating scroll-driven web animations

Typical Architecture & tech leadership tasks

Authoring deploy procedure documentation
Writing internal documentation and tech manuals
Technical leadership of a team of developers
Mentoring junior developers
Preparing solution engineering proposals for incoming projects
Conducting technical interviews
Setting tasks for team developers
Researching Git workflow patterns
Reviewing pull requests
“Shottun surgery”-style rewrites of the codebase

Typical Management tasks

Estimating large projects
Videocalls with client’s team
Generating upsell proposals for current clients
Participation in creating project roadmaps
Moving the project to a new task management system
Creating risk management assessment documents

Typical DevOps tasks

Deploying websites to Fly.io
Configuring automatic deployment pipeline via Heroku
Setting up Heroku pipelines & review apps
Creating custom supply chain vulnerability assessment tools
Setting up web sites at Heroku

Typical UI / UX tasks

Designing web pages (in various graphic editors)
Advice & guidance on better UX in the web interfaces
Fine-tuning web typography
Conducting customer journey map interviews with stakeholders

Typical QA tasks

Writing unit tests with RSpec
Writing feature tests with Capybara
Manual acceptance testing of other developers’ work

Typical Graphic design tasks

Correcting web typography

Projects

Internal CRM: Rails developer — An in-house document processing system and CRM for a law firm based on the East coast, specializing in franchises
Personal development app: UI designer — Trello-style board for personal development
GraphQL back-end for a React app: Ruby developer — A client-facing document workflow app for a law firm
Google Slides creator admin app: Tech lead — Admin app + React front-end helping employees prepare and create Google Slides
Project management portal: UI designer — Our company’s internal project management / analysis tool
Water measuring dashboards: Tech lead — Improving and creating new Ruby on Rails dashboards & forms
Custom Salesforce app: Tech lead — A reactive front-end app created as a Salesforce plugin (ApEx app)
Personal style consultant Shopify app: UX expert — A Shopify clothing store with a custom built style assistant widget
Grow-hacking team: The tech guy — Participating in a team aimed at introducing the Grow-hacking methods into our client funnel
Internal portal redesign: Tech lead — Adding a new version of UI to the existing Rails app
API for a ReactNative app: Tech lead — Ruby on Rails API for a ReactNative app
No-code purchase funnel: Tech lead — A simple website of 10 pages with progressive upsales on each step
Refund automation service: Full-stack developer — A client-facing service for purchase refunds
Design agency WordPress website: Front-end developer — Good old CSS work
Project client dashboard: Full-stack developer, designer, project owner — A dashboard for the clients of our web shop to grasp the state of things at their project
Disaster recovery reports generation service: Back-end developer — A web-based program to help communities become more resilient to disasters
Legal documentation processing: Back-end developer — Legal documentation processing for a pharma company
AI analytics dashboard: Building an AI analytics dashboard
Website redesign for an international consultancy: Web designer, UX advisor — Website redesign
A JotForm assessment tool: Front-end developer, UX advisor — Redesign & UI improvement of a JotForm
Architectural portfolio: Front-end developer — A static website full of animations
Programmatic marketing service: Technical recruiter — Finding 2 strong candidates

Technologies used

Main

Secondary

See my level of experience with those technologies

What I discovered while working here

With small number of endpoints, GraphQL will only make it longer
Sometimes the clients will avoid answering important questions necessary for architectural decisions, and you’ll have to nudge them (we had to start tracking Q/A in a shared document)
Most documented Git flows are worse than what we have been using
Clients of an IT service agency are happy with ridiculously long time of development, huge checks and lots of empty video calls just because they don’t know any better
A client may spend months adjusting shades of colors on a project before publishing it
The product owner can have false memories about how the app used to behave before we started our work, and you need to be able to provide a hands-on demonstration of the prior code in work
Even in your own organization, people who previously woked on a project, may quit with leaving zero documentation, and you’ll have to guess the reasoning for their architectural decisions

Feedback I received

I want to give a big shout-out to the client team and everyone who contributed: [...], Sergey Pedan, [...]. The stakeholders on the client’s side highlighted a few things on today’s yearly review: - S&F never says “we can’t do it” but discovering opportunities to resolve the issues - S&F made a difference and helped to hit 2024 milestone for one of the product - Leadership hears that the project-level stakeholders speak highly about S&F team - They appreciate our transparency and communication - They appreciate that S&F uncovers the gaps and brings in the right people in a flexible manner - The products are in a significantly better state than they were before us Good job everyone! 🔥 🙌🏻 🐹 This account is pretty small, [...], but it has been consistently bringing this profits for a year and a half and will continue to do so in 2025 (and hopefully grow).

NPS: 10 of 10

You could show my team, who are kind of more junior, where the bar is
NPS: 10 of 10

I’m supper happy with you guys
NPS: 10 of 10

I’d work with you guys on any project
NPS: 10 of 10

Page looks ggreat!!

I think this page looks absolutely beautiful @Sergey Pedan! I'd deliver this to [developer]. I think Leanne and Naomi will love it!

Looks great! well done, Sergey!

Sergey Pedan, looks fab! And thanks for introducing me to Figma’s features.

The S&F team has been fantastic to work with!

@Sergey Pedan thank you for your great work on this project! Everything went quite smoothly, and I truly appreciate your efforts, strong selling skills, and insightful ideas. Great job! 🔥

Good morning, my very good friends!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH for the amazing work!!! FYI team — we launched the site! You all are truly amazing and we would not have been able to do this herculean effort without ya’ll. So THANK YOU!!!! AND CONGRATULATIONS! This is a masterpiece — and I hope you’re proud to be part of this!

@Sergey Pedan your updates are beautiful 🤩

Delivery portal is on pause but this project looks like something I imagined delivery portal should be.

I think it looks great and will definitely serve the purpose. It seems to me that “Project Charter” issue in any Redmine project and S&F Delivery Portal are also trying to reach bird-eye overview of projects but in a different manner.

You guys are just so awesome and easy to work with
NPS: 10 of 10

You are crushing it
NPS: 10 of 10

We were able to get many big clients as a direct result of this system, they all see [project name] and love it
NPS: 10 of 10

NPS: 10 of 10

I really enjoy working with you 🙌🏻

I’m really impressed by Sergey’s ideas and his constant desire to improve the processes

Kudos to Sergey Pedan for a lot of ideas on the processes improvements

I want to give a shoutout to [PM] and @Sergey Pedan for successfully conducting a presale for [project name]. It’s a small project, but it’s just the first phase and a valuable step toward building stronger relations with this partner. Great job, both of you! 🐧

Wonderful — thank you for being fast Sergey!

I'm already starting to get some good and helpful feedback [about our changes]. Thank you so much for everything. It has been a pleasure working with you.

Thank you for being so easy to work with!
NPS: 10 of 10

The news about the impact that S&F has made for [the client] has grown. We now have another business unit that is very interested in quotes for a few projects.