Working With Rails

The bulk of my development experience has been in programming for the web. I currently work primarily with Ruby, Javascript and Lua, and in the past have worked extensively with Java and PHP. I dislike programming language bigotry and am a fan of well-made things, regardless of the technology behind them.

Much of my career has been oriented around using and contributing to open source in a business context. I’m the creator and maintainer of a high-profile Rails plugin, friendly_id, and have made contributions and fixes to Ruby on Rails’s support for internationalization and UTF-8 character encoding support. I’m the creator of a popular Behavior Driven Development library for Lua, and have created or contributed to many libraries related to Lua web development.

While my focus is on back-end systems and web application architecture, I believe it’s important to maintain a diverse set of skills when making a living in the world of web programming. I’m comfortable working on low-level things like Postgres drivers written in C, mid-level work like creating Rails applications and the ideal server setups to deploy them on, purely front-end work like DOM manipulation with jQuery, and implementing Photoshop designs in HTML and CSS.