Scott Taylor - smtlaissezfaire

I've been a software engineer most of my professional life — as an employee inside early-stage startups and consulting shops that built products for bigger companies and other early-stage startups, and later as a freelancer.
I also enjoy:
- violin
- learning new languages
- philosophy (I went to St. John's College)
- stock trading
- investing in real estate
- personal development
I also really like lists, if you can't tell

Yr 1: Started working for free at a little startup that went bust. Got plenty of experience.
Yr 2-5: Worked at East Media — a small consulting shop that was one of the first in the NYC ruby scene. Lots of interesting client projects here:
- the Webby Awards (2yrs in a row)
- fashion mobile startups (2x)
  - most notably built v1 of ideeli's iPhone app (company raised ~ $100m and later sold to Groupon)
- flavorpill.com
- kgb.com (superbowl ad!)
- boxcar
- Kaplan Thaler
- McGraw Hill
Yr 5: Also started a mobile mockup site Upstage App — which got featured in ReadWriteWeb
Yr 6: Joined Erly — a small team formed by ex Hulu, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google employees.
Yr 6: Erly was acquired by Airtime. Ran the computer vision section there, making sure Airtime didn't degrade into the worst parts of Chatroulette.
Yr 7-11: First employee @ LearnUp, backed by many of the best names in the valley, to solve unemployment + education issues in the US. We didn't get quite as far as we wanted to, but did have a modest amount of success and later sold to Manpower Group.

Cut teeth on Ruby by contributing to many open source projects, especially early versions of rspec (see this).
Created one of the first fixture replacement libraries (cleverly named "FixtureReplacement") - a library which "FactoryGirl" was largely based on.
Created a pure SQL based parser in treetop. It was very, very, slow, though.
Created first node debugger "ndb". ChromeTools recently took over the name "ndb":
https://www.nodenpm.com/ndb/1.0.42/detail.html

"Thanks to the 'OG' ndb

In early 2011, @smtlaissezfaire released the first serious debugger for Node.js, under the ndb package name. It's still preserved at github.com/smtlaissezfaire/ndb. We thank Scott for generously donating the package name."

Also got some praise from ryan dahl (the node.js creator), but message seems to be lost in the twitter-verse :)
Contributed to several open source projects: rails, fakefs, and over a hundred more.
Maintainer of MongoMapper, one of the main mongo libraries for Ruby
Plus lots of mongomapper plugins:
- fixturize - a quick way to speed up tests by fixturizing setup blocks
- mm_soft_deleted
- mm_eager_includer