Gerda Shank
Senior Software Engineer at Fishtown Analytics
New Hampshire, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGerda Shank is a Senior Software Engineer with 17 years of experience building backend systems, data integrations, and web applications, currently contributing to dbt at Fishtown Analytics. She combines deep hands-on expertise in Python, JavaScript, SQL, Elasticsearch, Kafka and AWS with practical DevOps skills around Docker, CI/CD and Kubernetes transitions. Her background includes managing and mentoring remote teams at ZipRecruiter, where she led Salesforce integrations, admin search and a move to containerized infrastructure. An active open-source contributor, she has made targeted, reliability-focused improvements to high-profile dbt adapters (Postgres, Snowflake, BigQuery, Spark), emphasizing performance, caching and SQL generation correctness. Based in New Hampshire, Gerda brings a long track record of shipping incremental improvements that meaningfully reduce operational risk while mentoring junior engineers.
17 years of coding experience
28 years of employment as a software developer
Technical management certificate, Technical management certificate at UCLA Extension - Custom Programs & Corporate EducationBachelor of Science (BS), Bachelor of Science (BS) at University of Wisconsin
French
Stackoverflow
336reputation
3kreached
10answers
0questions
Github Skills (23)
apache-spark10
bigquery10
postgresql10
python10
snowflake10
data-engineering10
testing10
data-modeling10
test-framework10
dbt10
sql10
error-handling10
git9
version-control9
pytest8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
dbt-labs/dbt-core
Aug 2020 - Jan 2023
dbt enables data analysts and engineers to transform their data using the same practices that software engineers use to build applications.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1255 reviews, 327 commits, 818 PRs in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Gerda primarily contributed to the dbt-core codebase by addressing issues related to data validation and SQL generation within the PostgreSQL adapter. They focused on improving code quality and reliability, as evidenced by the multiple commits involving error messages, code formatting, and fixing potential issues. The contributions indicate a focus on ensuring the correct behavior of the PostgreSQL adapter, particularly in relation to snapshotting.
analyticsdbt-viewpointtransformanalystssql
dbt-labs/dbt-bigquery
Oct 2020 - Jul 2022
dbt-bigquery contains all of the code required to make dbt operate on a BigQuery database.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 reviews, 9 commits, 28 PRs in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Gerda primarily contributed to the dbt-bigquery adapter, focusing on performance improvements and bug fixes. Their work included refactoring code for increased efficiency by optimizing classes, caching fields, and integrating libraries. They addressed issues in areas like incremental strategies, and implemented tests to ensure the adapter's functionality. They also made changes related to global CLI arguments and documentation generation.
data-analyticsanalytics-engineeringdbt-packagessqloperate
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