Mike Nelson
Retirement Engineering at Gusto
Portland, Maine, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMike Nelson is a seasoned engineering leader with 11 years of experience building and scaling product and platform teams, currently focused on retirement engineering at Gusto after a decade as CTO at Guideline where he helped build a full-featured, low-cost 401(k) stack. He combines hands-on backend expertise—evidenced by refactoring and performance work on Instacart’s makara read-write DB proxy—with product-minded architecture from roles at TaskRabbit and earlier startups he helped found or sell. Based in Portland, Maine, he’s comfortable across the stack and lifecycle: shipping mobile apps, web services, and developer-facing libraries while leading teams. A pragmatic problem-solver and lifelong tinkerer, he brings entrepreneurial instincts and a mechanical-engineering-rooted attention to systems and reliability.
11 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science at University of Southern Maine
English
Github Skills (5)
activerecord10
rspec10
error-handling10
ruby10
performance-optimization9
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
instacart/makara
Feb 2015 - Sep 2015
A Read-Write Proxy for Connections; Also provides an ActiveRecord adapter.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:26 commits, 14 PRs, 28 pushes in 7 months
Contributions summary:Mike primarily focused on refactoring and improving the `makara` library, which acts as a read-write proxy for database connections. Their contributions included improving error handling, optimizing performance through changes to `respond_to?` and `method_missing` implementations, and updating the version. The changes indicate a focus on making the library more robust and efficient. Furthermore, they are also responsible for refactoring the test suite.
proxyread-writerailsrubyadapter
taskrabbit/pie
Dec 2014 - Sep 2015
Contributions:359 commits, 51 PRs, 279 pushes in 8 months
macosapple
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