Working With Rails

I’m relatively recent to the Rails community—I started using Ruby and Rails professionally in Jan 2007. I’ve been doing web development for three years, using Java for back-end stuff before falling for Rails.

Before jumping into web development, my career was almost entirely in the shrink-wrap software arena. I started out developing on the Macintosh, then a mixture of Mac and Windows, with a stint as a manager of software engineers and project management to round it out.

I’m a generalist, software-wise—while I have experience with a lot of tools and technologies, I don’t consider myself truly an expert in any one. I enjoy getting new challenges, understanding the problems deeply, investigating various approaches (including learning new tools as necessary), and implementing complete solutions.

Once I started using Rails, I decided to focus my efforts there, because I think that its capabilities enable a serious amount of innovation with relatively small teams in really short amounts of time. The vast array of gems and plugins that are available and under constant development, plus the number and nature of the experienced Rails developers enjoy giving advice and direction to their peers, allow small teams to leverage their efforts to build much more sophisticated applications than I’ve experienced using other tools.

I also enjoy playing tennis, reading and learning about how to improve my development skills, and playing friendly games of Texas Hold ‘Em.