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
Currently
- I currently work at Go Free Range
Previously
- Software developer at Headshift for about 18 months
- Software developer at reevoo.com for about 3 years
- Unsuccessfully attempted to work for myself for about a year
- Software developer at Tempest Technology for about 3 years
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?
