Ryan Bigg

Lead Developer at Fat Zebra

Author of several books on Ruby, Rails and Elixir

Ryan Bigg

I've worked as a tech lead for a decade, but have worked as a developer for two decades. I'm comfortable with working with people all across the business from a brand-new junior all the way up to the CEO. I'm known for my ability to quickly nail down a problem and to work well across a variety of tech stacks and applications. I love helping people learn, and learning from them in return.

I've worked most recently across applications that handle payment processing. I have also worked in customer engagement surveys, internet-of-things, and developer training. I have a long history of writing documentation and technical books, and I have a passion for writing and teaching.

Skills

  • Technical Leadership
  • Mentoring
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Ruby
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Go
  • GraphQL
  • Design Systems
  • Documentation

Fat Zebra — Customer Experience, Lead Developer

Led a team that grew from 2-12 people, maintaining a handful of merchant & customer facing applications with strict uptime requirements. Collaborated on building the design system and rolling that out across the company. Led the tech implementation of an acquisition (another payment gateway) with an extremely tight deadline.

2021

Started in August 2021, working under the Acquiring team, working on payouts and merchant money movement.

Switched over to working on the Merchant Dashboard team with a designer. Was given a lot of free reign with project direction and uplift of the Merchant Dashboard's design. Updated the design to be more modern and to align with the rest of the company's branding.

2022

Brought on two new developers, one mid-level and one junior, and mentored them to become productive members of the team. We also brought on a new designer here. We took over ownership of the PayNow stack, which handles millions of transactions per month for household brands. This included a JavaScript SDK and its relevant documentation.

We also led the development of Zeal Design System, a React component library adopted across all Fat Zebra products.

We adopted GraphQL for the API layer of the Merchant Dashboard, and I was responsible for mentoring the team in GraphQL best practices and patterns.

2023

Brought on another junior developer to the team in April. Worked with them to upgrade our statementing system in Acquiring, which was a cross-team effort. Continued to mentor them throughout the year.

Took over maintenance of our SSO integration and supported merchants as they integrated with it. This included writing documentation and troubleshooting issues with the integration.

Led the development of the React SDK as an alternative to our JavaScript SDK.

Led the development of PayNow V3, a React-based rewrite of our payment processing forms to modernise the look & feel.

Worked with developers on my team and the Core Payments team to organise a major refactoring of our payment plans code.

Led the implementation of Click to Pay in conjunction with Mastercard, Visa and American Express. Click to Pay lets customers store and use their card details without having to enter them in every time.

2024

Integrated Apple Pay with PayNow V3 and provided support to merchants who were integrating.

Took ownership of the Reseller Dashboard application and led a major refactor of its codebase.

Promoted three developers on my team to mid-level (1) and senior (2) levels, and continued my mentorship of them and the rest of the team.

2025

Was handpicked to be one of the technical leads for the integration of the SecurePay API into Fat Zebra's payment platform. Shipped the first phase of the integration in under 3 months, and the second phase before the end of the year.

Hired three additional developers to the Customer Experience team, 2 seniors and 1 junior.

2026

Moved back into my role as Lead Developer on the Customer Experience team.

Involved in conversations of promoting a senior developer on my team to a lead role, and the subsequent hiring of a new senior developer to backfill their role.

Worked with the team to flesh out our hiring practices and interview process, and to implement a new hiring process for the company.

Liased with banks around what features they require our products to support, and then working with project managers across both organisations to prioritise that work.

Various — Freelance Contractor

Feb 2021 – August 2021

Working as a part-time "mercenary for hire" across a variety of tech stacks, but primarily focussing on Typescript-based React with Ruby on Rails backends.

  • 4-days-a-week as a TypeScript / React / Ruby developer, working in a team of around 4 people.
  • 3-days-a-week as a TypeScript / React / Ruby developer at a small company, primarily focussed on improving their frontend code, upgrading jQuery componentry to TypeScript-powered React.
    • In addition to that: I research and implemented platform stability measures by working with other developers to add additional Ruby tests, a CI system, and monitoring through logging and AppSignal.
  • 2-days-a-week upgrading a Ruby on Rails application from Rails 5.0 to 6.1, and tidying up other deprecation messages / warnings in the build logs.

Various — Full-time Developer

2007 - 2021

Working as a developer for a number of companies across a variety of tech stacks, but primarily focussed on Ruby on Rails. Companies include Covidence, Culture Amp and LIFX.

Tech Books— Author

December 2008 - Current

I have contributed extensively to documentation for Ruby and Rails and I wrote a few books about Rails, Ruby and Elixir. Your developers have probably read my books. Or perhaps you have!

You can read more about these books over on my books page.

To support writing these books, I wrote my own book review tool, called Twist. Twist is in its third incarnation, currently living as a Hanami application.