About Michael Jelks

Industry veteran with 20+ years in full stack web-based development. Started coding static HTML pages back in the late 90s with some Perl scripting thrown in. From there, I transitioned to additional dynamically interpreted languages. Fully conversant in all portions of the traditional LAMP stack and comfortable crafting traditional SQL, PHP/Ruby code, and HTML.

I'm a firm believer in the value of understanding business requirements up-front, and crafting a proper solution that is "good-enough" to manage the spec at hand. The most effective way of managing constant change is to rapidly prototype and get as much end-user feedback earlier in the development cycle to avoid any disconnect between the requirements and the engineered implementation.

This has allowed teams that I've worked with in the past to actually pare back features that are superfluous and focus on the important elements.

Effective manager of small-team developer groups. Responsible for running retrospectives as well as getting high-level project goals and breaking them down in weekly iteration planning sessions.

Comfortable working across the entire stack from front-end to backend. Background in traditional SQL with an understanding of the performance cost of ORMs (Object-Relational Mapping) in certain situations.

Proponent of Continuous Deployment. Integrated unit tests with rcov reports via Jenkins to generate a baseline threshold for code quality. Additionally, added functional tests to perform smoke testing across key areas of the application to ensure maximum uptime and a minimum of regressions.

Now currently utilizing the latest in industry-standard MVC frameworks including Ruby-on-Rails and React. I have also have familiarity utilizing node.js, React and MongoDB (or NoSQL equivalent).

Specialties

  • Ruby on Rails
  • PHP
  • SQL (MySQL/PostgreSQL)
  • MVC Frameworks
  • Apache configuration
  • Linux/BSD
  • HTML
  • Javascript + jQuery
  • Coffeescript
  • CSS
  • PERL
  • Haml
  • LESS
  • node.js
  • ReactJS
  • TypeScript

Additional Goodies

You get all of the above skills plus the following bonus items!

  • Fully conversant in Spanish. Se habla español.
  • Portrait and street photographer. Can take the next great headshot for the company website.

Contact Michael Jelks

> Software obeys the law of gaseous expansion – it continues to grow until memory is completely filled.

-Larry Gleason

Contact Me