Ruby on Rails, Coffeescript, Facebook Graph, Backbone.js, Scalability, PostgreSQL, WebGL

Seenly is a photobooth web app used to take over 51 million photos to date.

I created the first version using Actionscript 3, PHP and MySQL in 2007, and later migrated the system to use Ruby on Rails, HTML5, WebGL and PostgreSQL. I bootstrapped it to 850K unique visitors a month. It’s integrated with Facebook to allow users to connect and upload photos to their Facebook albums.

Challenges included storing over 50 million photos, implementing JPEG compression client-side, and making the webcam capture process as user friendly as possible.

Stripe, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, APIs, Javascript, Middleman

PieSync is a SaaS that synchronizes business SaaS apps using their APIs.

Responsible for the e-commerce functionality, I built the standard SaaS billing process with subscriptions, plans, and plan upgrades, using Rails, Stripe and Javascript allowing customers to sign-up and pay. I expanded the customer-facing dashboard where users configured their synchronizations.

I also worked on the internal Ruby back-end responsible for synchronizing the different systems, gaining tons of experience on interfacing with different RESTful and not-so-RESTful APIs.

Mattias Putman
CTO — PieSync

David is a great engineer and a people person at the same time. He communicates very clearly about expectations, progress and priorities and just gets the job done, fast!

Ruby on Rails, Performance, Memcache, Sphinx

Tightship is a policy compliance system for enterprise and municipal corporations.

I was in charge of upgrading a poorly maintained codebase from Rails 2.1 to Rails 4, while adding extra features as well as improving performance. I managed to speed up pageviews from a staggering 12+ seconds down to less than 2 seconds using careful caching and code improvements.

Challenges were gradually refactoring away the considerable technical debt in line with the client’s budget, and maintaining security while applying caching.

Duncan Malcolm
Project Manager — Tightship

David is one of those rare high-calibre engineers who is not only great at doing his job and communicating well but is also a great guy who gets on well with everyone.

Reverse Robocall US

Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Telephony API, Spree, Ecommerce, Sass

Reverse Robocall harnesses the power of Telephony API’s to spread customers’ messages to selected politicians.

We were contracted to build a web app where users could purchase automated robocalls sent to politicians. As part of the purchasing process, the customer was called up so they could leave a message, after which it was automatically sent to selected groups of politicians.

I integrated Spree, a shopping cart environment, with Tropo, a Twilio-like Telephony API, to make calling customers and recording their message a part of the purchasing process. After purchase, we initiated calls to the politicians and played back the message. We automated sending hundreds of robocalls to politicians.

Reverse Robocall was featured on Slashdot and Ars Technica.

Ryan Wilcox
Project Lead — Wilcox Development Solutions

The app involved integrations with unfamiliar tools, which David quickly picked up, efficiently solving some integration problems in the process. David is a fine engineer, dependable person, and great with clients.

Ruby, Nanoc, Scalability, Coffeescript, MVP

DealRoundup is a curated collection of promotions and offers for developers

I developed DealRoundup from idea to MVP in two hours on the morning of Black Friday. It went viral and reached the front page on Hacker News and Product Hunt in a short amount of time.

Built with nanoc sprinkled with client-side javascript and deployed to a CDN it had no problem keeping up with over 50K unique visitors in one day, staying fast throughout. At the end of Cyber Monday a profit of $X.000 was achieved.

Want your web app here as well?

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David Verhasselt

Senior full-stack engineer with 5 years of experience building web applications for clients all over the world.