Spike Ilacqua
Principal Software Engineer at Recurly
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSpike Ilacqua is a Principal Software Engineer with 17 years of experience building pragmatic, reliable systems that tame complex, “impossible” problems for clients and products. Based in Boulder, he blends hands-on engineering—from Ruby on Rails APIs and React/Vue frontends to mobile apps and infrastructure—with leadership that grows teams and shipping velocity. He has a long record as a founder and operator, having built and run a service business for decades managing networking, servers, billing, and growth, and more recently led application development and AI-augmented search (RAG) solutions for enterprise customers. An active contributor to open-source projects, Spike has improved testing and maintainability in well-known repos like octokit.rb and PHPOffice/PHPWord, demonstrating a focus on quality and reproducible engineering. Practical, curious, and client-focused, he’s as comfortable mentoring engineers as he is designing integrations that automate tedious workflows and reduce headcount pressure.
17 years of coding experience
30 years of employment as a software developer
Linguistics Italian, Linguistics Italian at University of Colorado BoulderBoston University
English, Italian
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (11)
phpunit10
testing10
php10
octokit10
github-api10
github10
vcr10
test-automation10
ruby10
docx9
documentation8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
octokit/octokit.rb
Jun 2019 - Aug 2019
Ruby toolkit for the GitHub API
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:23 commits, 2 PRs, 4 pushes in 2 months
Contributions summary:Spike primarily contributed to the testing infrastructure of the `octokit/octokit.rb` repository, which is a Ruby toolkit for the GitHub API. Their commits focused on enhancing the test suite by modifying VCR cassette recording settings, and updating tests to match the current branch protection API. They also updated test setup and corrected tests.
apioctokit-rbsdkruby
PHPOffice/PHPWord
Sep 2014 - Oct 2014
A pure PHP library for reading and writing word processing documents
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:8 commits in 10 days
Contributions summary:Spike focused on enhancing the `phpoffice/phpword` library by adding missing setters for page size properties and creating tests for page width and height. The user's contributions involved modifying the `src/PhpWord/Style/Section.php` file to include setter methods and the `tests/PhpWord/Tests/Style/SectionTest.php` file to validate these changes. Furthermore, the user updated documentation related to page size settings. This work indicates a focus on code functionality and improving the project's maintainability and testing coverage.
powerpointdocxpdfodtlibreoffice-writer
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