About me

Although heavily influenced by my begging for a job post I intend to keep this up to date so I don’t feel too bad about replicating it here.

Employment

I currently work at Headshift. Before that I spent just over three years at reevoo.com, until being made redundant on Monday 8th Dec 2008. I was very unsuccessfully (I basically ended up working for free) my own boss for just over a year before that and a software developer at Tempest Technology for about three years before that.

Skills

• Ruby. A splendid little language.
• Rails. Although I started using Rails in August 2005, I’ve definitely missed out on some of the more recent changes.
• Javascript. Should only be used to enhance existing functionality and should (probably) never be required for a site.
• HTML. I love clean and semantically marked up HTML.
• CSS. I’m not brilliant with CSS and although I can get reasonable results it’ll take me longer than it would someone that really knows their stuff.
• Pair Programming. I prefer to pair program, particularly on production code.
• Testing. I pretty much struggle to do anything if I’m unable to test it in some way. I’ve not really bought into anything like rspec and test/unit is still my tool of choice.

Desired working environment

• I want to work with smart people.
• I want to work on software that has a purpose I believe in.
• I want to work somewhere that I’m able to question decisions and have my questions listened to.
• I want to work with open source software.
• I want to contribute back to the open source community.

Likes

• Simple solutions (apache and webby over a rails app, for example).
• Learning and sharing knowledge.
• Prioritising by always working on the next most important thing.
• Helping people through technology.
• The disruptive nature of technology.
• My Society. I love the stuff that these guys do.
• Transparency in business.
• Permalinks that are actually, you know, permanent.
• HTTP. I love the simplicity and power of this ubiquitous protocol.

Dislikes

• SEO. In my opinion, it’s as simple as doing the right thing (follow web standards, provide something useful and think about the user).
• Websites that don’t get the web (activeplaces.com, nationalrail.co.uk)
• Websites that are poorly marked up, therefore making scraping them hard :-) (particularly bank websites)
• Marketing shite. Surely we’re all grown up enough to speak to each other as people, aren’t we?

Location

Ramsgate in Kent in the UK