Working With Rails

Who I am

My name is Alexander Lebedev, I am project manager and software developer located in St. Petersburg, Russia. I used to work in software development outsourcing with US companies for last few years.

My goals

My current goal is to build a software consulting business around myself. I see a great opportunities in helping US companies to develop better software with less expenses and do better maintenance for existing products. I enjoy having small number of very smart people around so this business will probably never grow large in number of people but will definitely do in terms of quality and technology. I am focused on strategic partnership rather than one time projects. I believe it leads to more interesting projects and helps developers to fully apply their talents to the job.

From management perspective I am constantly searching for practices that make software get real faster and life of developers easier. At the moment we used to work in Agile process with rapid development, short feedback loop and little formalities. Getting things done is more important than doing the right process so I try to keep everything conscious and pragmatic instead of blindly following strictly defined process.

Another major area of interest is building efficient quality control with unit testing, continuous integration, automated functional testing. This stuff already proven to have very positive effect. I keep looking how to make it better.

From technology perspective I find myself at home with web and database development. The areas I am currently digging into are dynamic languages, Python and Ruby, and modern web development frameworks, Ruby on Rails and Django.