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Ship fast build smart scale big.

A Rails full-stack engineer who builds the whole thing and makes it fast. Here's why I'd fit Better Stack.

View Experience Ask AI About Me
Quintin Adam

Quintin Adam

Software Engineer

Remote / USA
"
A note for Better Stack

I figured the best way to apply to a company that ships was to ship something. This whole page is mine — built on Rails 8, Turbo, and Tailwind (overkill for one page, I know) — with an AI assistant I wrote and a live status badge running on your own Uptime API. Call it a small, working sample of how I build.

I'm a Rails full-stack engineer with real depth in architecture and backend performance — the work I actually reach for is making slow systems fast. I ship end to end, I move quickly, and I use AI hard without taking my hands off the wheel. Give me a problem and I'll hand you a working version of the answer, not a plan for one.

That's the pitch: I build good software fast, I sweat the craft, and Better Stack looks like the best place I've found to do both at full speed. I'd love the chance to talk — and the opportunity to build at Better Stack.

Why Better Stack

I've spent my career inside observability and performance tooling, and I've got opinions about all of it. Better Stack is the rare one I'd actually want to use and build — fast, OpenTelemetry-native, and going somewhere genuinely interesting. The AI SRE work is the part I can't stop thinking about: agentic root-cause analysis is exactly the kind of hard, new problem I'd love to help develop and ship, and it sits right on top of the AI work I'm already deep in. There's a lot here I'd get to learn and build, and that's the experience I'm after next.

What seals it is who's building it, and how. Engineers for engineers, founders who still write code, craft treated as the work rather than a nice-to-have. I work hard, and I want the people around me firing at that same level — high trust, real intensity, a team that meets you there instead of slowing you down. Twelve years in, what I'm looking for is more autonomy and a team I can move genuinely fast with. Better Stack reads like exactly that from the outside, and I want to find out from the inside.

Why I'm a fit
  • I'd fit how you work

    The way you operate is how I do my best work: async-first, results over meetings, bias toward simple. I'd rather ship and measure than sit in a planning call. A lot of the posting read like things I already believe — that's the actual reason I'm applying, not just the stack.

  • A generalist who specializes

    I ship end to end — backend to frontend, schema to UI — and I go deep where it matters: Rails architecture, backend performance, and high-volume background-job systems (Sidekiq) are my specialty. Breadth to build the whole product, depth on the parts that decide whether it scales.

  • AI as a tool, not a crutch

    I use AI to ship aggressively — right now I'm building AI-powered search and the content builders that feed it. What makes it work is clear, precise direction to the agents, so I keep full control and a complete picture of what's being built instead of vibe-coding myself into a corner.

  • I speak your language

    Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Vue, Turbo, Tailwind — the stack in your posting is the one I'm in daily. I'm deep on the infra side too: AWS and Terraform, Docker, migrating systems off Heroku onto AWS, and Prometheus + Grafana dashboards I built for performance and load testing.

  • Performance is the part I reach for

    Chasing slow queries and tuning hot paths is the work I actually enjoy, and I've used just about every metrics and observability tool there is along the way. When I found this role I signed up and wired this page's live status badge to your Uptime API the same day — because when the job is making software fast, good tooling is the highest-leverage thing I can have.

quintin-ai — ruby llm_assistant.rb
zsh

Loading quintin-ai v11.42.1...

Model: claude-sonnet-4.6 · tools: experience, stats, skills, background

Context: ~/quintin/experience/*.md

Type help for commands (ls, cat, stats…) — or just ask me anything.

─────────────────────────────────────────

quintin-ai: Hello! I'm Quintin's AI assistant. Ask me anything about his experience, skills, or request a custom resume.

Suggested queries:

1 / 2 next ›
❯

responses generated from quintin's professional context | powered by Claude

Experience

About

I didn't come to code in a straight line. I started as an audio engineer in Michigan, spent a few years producing and DJing electro house (the high point: Deadmau5 playing his own unofficial remix of one of my tracks while I was on stage), then taught skiing at Deer Valley. The real turn came during a slow summer working a sales job at Best Buy — bored out of my mind, I decided to learn to program, and the moment I found Ruby I never looked back.

That new skill became a new career, and the career became freedom: I could build great products from anywhere in the world. So I sold almost everything, put my Tesla Model S in storage, and spent the next five years as a digital nomad, working my way through Central and South America, Asia, and Europe. Eight months on an island in Thailand turned into a meditation and yoga practice I still keep every morning.

The thread through all of it is teaching and mentoring. Production software, a ski slope, a handstand, a junior engineer's first pull request — the part I love is the moment something clicks for someone else. When I landed in Osaka I started an AcroYoga meetup to find my people, and some of them are my closest friends today. Code just turned out to be the medium that stuck.

Now I'm in Osaka with my wife and a new baby, thirty minutes from a hiking trail one way and the center of the city the other. That balance, deep technical focus next to a real life away from the screen, is the whole point for me.

And I genuinely love this work. Ruby and Rails let me take an idea and have it running in production by the end of the day with almost no ceremony, and after twelve years that still feels like a kind of magic. Lately the ceiling has moved again: I've woven AI into nearly every part of how I build — writing, reviewing, debugging, reading unfamiliar code, and designing the agent tooling my team works inside every day — and it's unlocked a level of performance and ambition I didn't have a year ago. We're at the start of the biggest shift in software I've seen in my career, and I intend to be building right at the front of it.

Coding Activity

12.9K
Commits
2.3M
Lines Added
1.0M
Net Lines

Commits per week

All projects combined · each cell is one week

Less
More

Anatomy of a Request

Pick a question and watch a real, instrumented trace of how the AI terminal answers it — guardrail screen → Claude call → tool execution → final response, each span timed on one timeline like an OpenTelemetry waterfall. These are live API calls (cached up to 60s), not a recording.

Trace

▶ pick a question above to run a live trace

Model answer

request guardrail llm tool

Real-User Vitals

This page's own Core Web Vitals, measured live in your browser via the Performance API and graded against Google's thresholds — the same client-side signal a RUM agent collects. Nothing is sent anywhere; it's computed locally, right here.

TTFB
—
Time to First Byte
FCP
—
First Contentful Paint
LCP
—
Largest Contentful Paint
INP
—
Interaction to Next Paint
CLS
—
Cumulative Layout Shift
Good Needs work Poor · INP appears once you interact

Live Logs

Structured events from this app, tailing in real time — a miniature of Better Stack's Log Management. Click around or run a trace above and watch the requests land. Only method, path, status, and timing are logged — never your input.

~/logs — tail -f

Service Level Objective

A 99.90% availability target for quintinadam.io over a rolling 30-day window, with the error budget computed from real Better Stack downtime — the way an SRE actually watches a service.

99.90%
Target
100%
30-day actual
0.0×
Burn rate
Error budget remaining 43.2 / 43.2 min

Meeting SLO · 0 min downtime used of 43.2 min budget · 30-day window · source: Better Stack

Incident Post-mortem

Pick a real, resolved incident from one of this site's own dependencies and Claude writes a blameless post-mortem from the public status timeline — mirroring Better Stack's AI post-mortems. Grounded in the actual updates; nothing invented.

loading recent incidents…

Post-mortem

▶ choose an incident above to generate a post-mortem

Query me over MCP

The same read-only tools this site's AI assistant uses are exposed as a Model Context Protocol server. Add it to Claude Code (or any MCP client) and ask about my experience, skills, or this site's live status from your own terminal.

add to Claude Code 
claude mcp add --transport http quintin https://www.quintinadam.io/mcp

tools: get_experience · search_background · get_coding_stats · get_skills · get_availability · get_site_status — all read-only

LET'S CONNECT

Let's build something worth keeping.

I'm based in Osaka and work remotely with teams around the world. If you're building something interesting, I want to hear about it.

Quintin@HEY.com @QuintinAdam