Chris Gaffney
Owner at Dead Man's Snitch
Holland, Michigan, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Gaffney is an experienced software engineer and entrepreneur with 16 years building backend systems, currently owning Dead Man's Snitch and serving as a Senior Developer at Collective Idea from Holland, Michigan. He brings deep Ruby/Rails and database expertise—evidenced by substantive open-source contributions to MongoMapper and the Octopus sharding project where he fixed compatibility and connection issues across Rails versions. His background includes architecting web and networked applications for home automation and vehicle tracking, including the nationally exposed Schlage Link project. Comfortable refactoring core persistence logic and hardening test environments, he blends pragmatic bug-fixing with structural improvements that reduce long-term technical debt. Chris pairs hands-on engineering with product-minded ownership, favoring durable fixes over quick patches. He quietly favors compatibility and resilience work that keeps legacy systems running smoothly while enabling growth.
15 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Grand Valley State University
Github Skills (12)
activerecord10
ruby-rails10
rails10
sharding10
ruby10
mysql9
testing9
databases8
rspec8
database8
ruby-on-rails8
sql7
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
mongomapper/mongomapper
Jul 2010 - Oct 2012
A Ruby Object Mapper for Mongo
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:9 commits in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Chris's commits primarily focus on fixing bugs and improving the functionality of the MongoMapper library. They addressed issues related to compatibility with older Ruby versions and Rubinius, and they enhanced the modifier functionality to support multiple IDs. Furthermore, the user provided a fix for issues in associations when iterating over many associations in callbacks.
ruby-object-mappermongomongoidobject-mapperruby
thiagopradi/octopus
Feb 2012 - Mar 2012
Database Sharding for ActiveRecord
Role in this project:Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:18 commits in 9 days
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the `Octopus` project, a database sharding solution for ActiveRecord. Their work involved fixing compatibility issues with different Rails versions, specifically Rails 3.0.x and 3.2.x. They refactored code related to database connections, table names, and group access, demonstrating a deep understanding of the project's core functionality and its interaction with ActiveRecord. The user also made adjustments to the testing environment.
ruby-on-railsdatabase-shardingrailsmongoidsharding
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