Derek Houck
Senior Software Engineer at Nava
Kansas City, Missouri, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDerek Houck is a senior full-stack software engineer with a decade of professional experience and a six-year focus on test-driven development, currently building production tooling at Nava. He has a track record of delivering measurable impact—automating a 30+ icon conversion into web components to save 40 hours and cutting internal dashboard load time by 99.4%—while improving developer practices through testing, refactors, and mentorship. Comfortable across Ruby/Rails, Node, React, and accessibility-conscious front-end work, Derek specializes in turning complex legacy systems and content platforms into maintainable, high-performance products for government and enterprise clients. A former actor, he leverages strong communication skills to bridge technical and non-technical stakeholders and to lead hiring and team processes. Based in Kansas City, he combines pragmatic engineering with a habit of documenting and institutionalizing best practices so teams scale without sacrificing quality.
10 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Associate of Arts (A.A.), Acting, Associate of Arts (A.A.), Acting at American Academy of Dramatic Arts-Los AngelesEngineering Immersion, Engineering Immersion at Thinkful
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (28)
git10
random-generation10
github10
user-feedback10
api10
sling10
frontend10
rad10
patch9
ruby9
rails9
product-management9
cockpit9
oms9
react8
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
derekhouck/dotfiles
Jul 2017 - Nov 2024
Contributions:78 pushes, 1 branch in 7 years 5 months
derekhouck/My-Board-Game-Shelf
Feb 2019 - Dec 2019
Contributions:148 pushes, 15 branches in 10 months
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