Nathan Stitt
Senior Software Engineering Manager at Argosity
Holts Summit, Missouri, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNathan Stitt is a senior software engineering manager with 17 years of experience leading teams that deliver data-intensive web and mobile applications, currently running engineering for education research and open educational resources at Rice University. He combines hands-on backend and infrastructure skill—demonstrated by contributions to notable open-source Ruby projects like DocumentCloud and Discourse’s message_bus—with a track record of bootstrapping secure, scalable systems from MVP to production. Nathan excels at mentoring developers and creating document-driven, no-blame cultures that accelerate delivery, having stood up teams and infrastructure for a $95M research initiative in nine months. His career began in the late 90s building e-commerce and ERP integrations, which gives him deep product-facing engineering instincts and a practical appreciation for long-term operational reliability. He runs a boutique consulting firm, Argosity, applying that same mix of technical depth and customer-focused design to long-term client engagements. Collected across decades of work, his contributions emphasize reliability, performance, and maintainability over flashy features.
17 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Columbia CollegeHistory Teacher Education, History Teacher Education at Southeast Missouri State University
Github Skills (28)
database-migrations10
ruby-rails10
javascript10
xmlhttprequest10
postgresql10
back-end-development10
api-design10
packaging10
rails10
ruby10
package10
message-bus10
activerecord10
database-migration10
restful-api9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
documentcloud/documentcloud
Sep 2012 - Mar 2015
The DocumentCloud platform
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Infrastructure Engineer
Back-end Developer & Infrastructure EngineerContributions:792 commits, 1 PR, 25 pushes in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Nathan contributed to the DocumentCloud platform, making changes to both the back-end and infrastructure of the project. The user's commits showcase their ability to fix bugs, and improve the systems, as demonstrated by the updates to the library dependencies, database migrations, and the introduction of the ability to track document hashes. They also worked on performance improvements to enhance the platform's functionality, indicated by their contribution to speed up the database code.
documentcloud
documentcloud/cloud-crowd
Sep 2013 - Feb 2015
Parallel Processing for the Rest of Us
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:35 commits, 1 branch, 2 comments in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Nathan primarily focused on improving the CloudCrowd backend system. They addressed issues related to thread safety and database connection management by implementing a `defer` method to manage ActiveRecord connections within threads. They also refactored the code to handle exceptions, such as request timeouts and connection refused, to prevent system failures. Furthermore, the user optimized the server's performance by introducing event-driven distribution of jobs and periodic distribution with a timer backup, alongside implementing a timestamped logging mechanism.
parallel-processing
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