Nickolas Means
Engineering Manager, Ruby And Rails Infrastructure at Managing Up
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNickolas Means is a seasoned engineering leader with 18 years of experience building and scaling distributed product organizations, currently leading Ruby and Rails infrastructure at Shopify from Austin. He has repeatedly stabilized fragile platforms, rebuilt engineering processes for greater predictability and psychological safety, and led fast, high-stakes integrations at GitHub including Semmle and Dependabot. A longtime advocate for distributed work and an international keynote speaker on leadership, he co-hosts the Managing Up podcast to share practical, people-first management practices. His hands-on Ruby pedigree includes meaningful open-source contributions to the pony email library, reflecting a willingness to dive into low-level reliability and developer experience issues.
18 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.) Management Information Systems, Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.) Management Information Systems at Baylor University - Hankamer School of Business
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (7)
e-mail10
sendmail10
mailsender10
emailjs10
send-email10
ruby10
base648
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
benprew/pony
Sep 2009 - Oct 2009
The express way to send mail from Ruby.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits in 25 days
Contributions summary:Nickolas primarily worked on enhancing the `pony` library, which is used for sending emails from Ruby applications. Their contributions included addressing issues with attachment display, improving attachment handling by determining MIME types, adding functionality like the ability to include "cc" recipients, and configuring `sendmail` to correctly read addresses from message headers. These changes refined core email functionality.
mailrailsemailexpressruby
nmeans/actionwebservice
Sep 2013 - Jun 2018
Contributions:6 commits, 3 pushes in 4 years 10 months
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