Erica Kastner
Lead Developer at Thoughtworks
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolErica Kastner is a product-minded tech leader and Lead Developer based in Barcelona with over 17 years of hands-on experience and more than two decades in software overall. She specializes in guiding cross-functional teams and shaping technical strategy and architecture for large, mission-critical systems—having coordinated programs spanning 120+ developers for high-throughput auction and payments platforms. Erica blends pragmatic engineering with sustainable practices, migrating monoliths to microservices, designing data-mesh approaches, and implementing robust CI/CD and testing strategies. A pragmatic open-source contributor in the Ruby ecosystem, she’s improved key libraries like Moneta and Hutch to enhance database adapter compatibility and message-consumer configurability. Known for coaching engineers and building delivery practices, she repeatedly turns complex domain needs into scalable, maintainable platforms. Quietly detail-oriented, she pairs deep backend expertise with a knack for operationalizing reliability across global teams.
17 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at Iowa State University
Github Skills (13)
rabbitmq10
activerecord10
rspec10
key-value-store10
message-queue10
ruby10
configuration-management9
unit-testing9
error-handling8
multithreading8
bundler8
database-design8
yaml7
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
moneta-rb/moneta
Feb 2011 - Sep 2011
a unified interface to key/value stores
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits in 6 months
Contributions summary:Erica primarily focused on enhancing the Moneta library's ActiveRecord adapter, a unified interface for key/value stores. Their contributions included implementing support for existing ActiveRecord connections, making the gem more bundle-friendly, and fixing issues related to serialization. Furthermore, the user addressed database-related problems and improved the adapter's functionality and compatibility. They also bumped the library's version several times.
hotel-bookingrubynodejsunified-interfacekey-value
ruby-amqp/hutch
Aug 2015 - Sep 2015
A system for processing messages from RabbitMQ.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 4 PRs, 12 comments in 22 days
Contributions summary:Erica primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and configurability of the `hutch` message processing system. They introduced a new configuration option, `worker_pool_size` (later renamed to `consumer_pool_size`), to control the number of worker threads. They also added the ability to configure how errors are acknowledged, implementing a mechanism for custom error handling, and added a failing spec to test the ack/requeue functionality. Furthermore, the user allowed configuration of exchange options for more flexibility.
rabbitmq
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