Brandon Hilkert
CTO at Bark.us
Laguna Niguel, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrandon Hilkert is a seasoned CTO and founder with 14 years of experience building scalable web and mobile products, currently leading Bark.us to deliver technology that protects children online. He blends hands-on backend engineering—contributing to prominent Ruby projects like Sidekiq and authoring enhancements to the sucker_punch async library—with product and architecture leadership across startups and mid-market SaaS. Brandon has a track record of shipping pragmatic infrastructure solutions (immutable EC2 deployments, Redis pub/sub, and ML integrations) and rapid product wins, including a people-matching feature that attracted press at SXSW. Based in Laguna Niguel, he pairs entrepreneurial grit and a maker’s mentality with a focus on teams driven by purpose, and he’s known for improving developer ergonomics and operational efficiency behind the scenes.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
BS Mechanical Engineering, BS Mechanical Engineering at Virginia TechWest Chester University of PennsylvaniaBrandywine High School
Stackoverflow
4,315reputation
694kreached
21answers
55questions
Github Skills (15)
webui10
testing10
background-processing10
celluloid10
sidekiq10
concurrency10
ruby10
api-design9
http6
heroku6
cors6
javascript6
sqlite6
jquery6
ruby-on-rails6
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
brandonhilkert/sucker_punch
Jan 2013 - Aug 2022
Sucker Punch is a Ruby asynchronous processing library using concurrent-ruby, heavily influenced by Sidekiq and girl_friday.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 273 commits, 54 PRs in 9 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Brandon's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the `sucker_punch` library, a Ruby asynchronous processing library. They added features related to Celluloid, a concurrency framework, integrating it into the worker class. The user also implemented configuration options and delegation to allow for a more flexible and customizable queueing system. Additionally, the user made enhancements to testing capabilities, adding inline testing and testing stub libraries to verify the library's behavior.
asynchronousconcurrent-rubyrubysidekiq
sidekiq/sidekiq
Nov 2012 - Jan 2022
Simple, efficient background processing for Ruby
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:106 commits, 4 PRs, 14 pushes in 9 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Brandon made several contributions to improve the Sidekiq Web UI. They modified the UI to manage retries and scheduled jobs using the 'jid' instead of the 'score'. They also added "Delete All" and "Retry All" buttons to the retries page. Moreover, the user improved API efficiency and integrated dashboard functionality.
background-processingrubysidekiqbackground-jobsjobs
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