Derek Bender
Senior Software Engineer at SRS Acquiom
California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerek Bender is a Senior Software Engineer and team lead with 14 years building scalable Ruby on Rails and React platforms, currently based in California. He has driven large migrations from Gerrit/Jenkins to GitHub Actions, implemented reproducible Nix builds, and hardened CI/CD and dependency security across hundreds of repositories. Derek has shipped high-impact features for Canvas LMS—one of the largest open-source Rails apps—and optimized performance and developer productivity at consumer-facing sites like GreatSchools.org. He combines backend expertise (database schema, feature flags, grading systems) with front-end polish, and favors automation to help teams ship faster and safer. Known for turning slow local setups into minutes and reducing deploy friction tenfold, he treats every project as an opportunity to teach and improve engineering culture.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at University of Nebraska at OmahaComputer Science, Computer Science at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Github Skills (7)
database-migrations10
database-migration10
postgresql10
ruby-on-rails9
rails9
feature-flags9
activerecord9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
instructure/canvas-lms
Dec 2014 - Jun 2020
The open LMS by Instructure, Inc.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:432 commits, 1 PR, 9 pushes in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Derek primarily contributed to the development of back-end features and database schema changes within the Canvas LMS project. Their work included implementing feature flags for anonymous moderated marking, adding anonymous IDs to submissions, and modifying database migrations. The user also focused on features related to grading and student submissions.
open-lmsinstructurecanvas-lmslmsinc
get-bridge/docker-base-images
Jul 2022 - Apr 2024
Official Bridge docker base images
Contributions:48 reviews, 84 PRs, 152 pushes in 1 year 9 months
docker-imagebridgedockerbase-imagesdocker-compose
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