Taavo Smith
Senior Engineering Manager at Buildertrend
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTaavo Smith is a senior engineering manager with 14 years of hands-on and leadership experience building and modernizing large-scale systems across finance, healthcare, retail, and enterprise software. He excels at scaling engineering discipline and teams—hiring managers, running intake and planning, and delivering especially when programs are technically challenging or organizational change is constant. Comfortable bridging technical and business stakeholders, he has led modernization and developer-experience efforts for global customers and run AI security initiatives for a Fortune‑10 retailer. A pragmatic engineer at heart, Taavo has contributed to well-known Ruby projects like CarrierWave and RailsAdmin, improving robustness around uploads, validations, and nested forms. Based in New York, he combines a love of efficiency at scale with a track record of creating positive workplaces where ambitious goals get shipped.
14 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
BA Major Concentration: Computer Science; Minor Concentrations: Mathematics Physics English, BA Major Concentration: Computer Science; Minor Concentrations: Mathematics Physics English at Macalester College
Github Skills (14)
uri-encoding10
configuration-management10
rspec10
ruby-rails10
javascript10
rails10
capybara10
file-upload10
ruby-on-rails10
ruby10
web-framework9
testing9
html6
css5
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
carrierwaveuploader/carrierwave
Feb 2013 - Nov 2013
Classier solution for file uploads for Rails, Sinatra and other Ruby web frameworks
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Taavo primarily focused on improving the file upload functionality of the CarrierWave gem. Their contributions included URI encoding of file paths to handle special characters correctly and refining the download process to ensure proper handling of URLs. They also refactored and optimized core components, such as the Fog storage adapter, to enhance performance and address specific edge cases. The changes included adjustments to both the core library and the test suite to improve coverage and reliability.
ruby-on-railsruby-gemsinatrarailsruby
DavyJonesLocker/client_side_validations
Sep 2011 - Oct 2012
Client Side Validations made easy for Ruby on Rails
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:9 commits in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Taavo primarily contributed to the client-side validation logic for Ruby on Rails applications. Their work included fixing bugs related to browser compatibility, particularly with Internet Explorer, by namespacing global variables. The user refactored test suites, renamed JavaScript namespaces, and implemented a local uniqueness validation to improve the functionality and testing of client-side validations. Additionally, the user updated the code to handle nested attributes with non-numeric indexes.
ruby-on-railsvalidationclient-siderailsvalidations
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