Nick Marden
Founder at Tight Line
Rangeley, Maine, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNick Marden is a founder and seasoned software engineer with 14 years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale Internet applications from the database layer to deployment automation. He runs Rapid River Software and Tight Line, specializing in web apps, cloud/Linux operations, deployment frameworks, and database architecture, and has repeatedly delivered major cost and reliability improvements in production environments. As a former CTO and principal engineer, he led large migrations and CI/CD/Kubernetes initiatives that halved operating costs and supported thousands of concurrent containers and thousands of deploys per year. He contributes to open-source database sharding work for ActiveRecord, demonstrating deep practical knowledge of connection management, query caching, and sharded migrations. Based in Rangeley, Maine, he combines hands-on systems engineering with building multinational engineering networks and hiring/training distributed teams. Outside work he’s a father of three and a Red Sox fan—details that speak to his ability to balance high-stakes technical leadership with a grounded, people-focused approach.
13 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Candidate Condensed Matter and Materials Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Candidate Condensed Matter and Materials Physics at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBA Physics Math, BA Physics Math at University of Chicago
English, French
Stackoverflow
61reputation
3kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (9)
activerecord10
databases10
rails10
sharding10
ruby-on-rails10
database10
ruby10
postgresql7
rubymine6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
thiagopradi/octopus
Sep 2013 - Mar 2016
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 commits, 6 PRs, 4 pushes in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Nick primarily contributed to the `octopus` project, which focuses on database sharding for ActiveRecord. Their commits involved implementing features and fixing bugs related to query caching, nested validations, and connection management within a sharded database environment. They also refactored code to enhance performance and maintainability and added support for migrations in a sharded environment. These changes demonstrate a deep understanding of the project's core functionalities and the challenges of database sharding.
ruby-on-railsdatabase-shardingrailsmongoidsharding
GSA/font-awesome-grunticon-rails
Jul 2015 - Dec 2017
Font Awesome icons without web fonts, courtesy of Grunticon
Contributions:2 PRs, 8 pushes, 4 branches in 2 years 5 months
web-fontsfontfontswoff2icons
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