Working With Rails

I have been a professional web developer for high traffic data driven web sites for over 6 years now. This has given me a wealth of experience with mySQL, HTML and PHP. I have worked in various companies, although most of them have been less than 20 staff, and I have used various ticket tracking systems, although trac is the usual choice.

I am very interested in the latest technologies, and always try to stay up to date. I have been using Ruby on Rails for around 2.5 years now, and Django for 6 months. Over the last couple of months I have begun learning the Merb framework and even more recently the Waves framework. On the front end side, I usually use the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), as it is easy to use, and provides cross-browser support for the majority of browsers. I have also been experimenting with replacing html/css with haml/sass. When AJAX is required, I usually find Prototype and Scriptaculous to be sufficient. Until a few weeks ago I had been using SVN version control for all of my work, but I have just moved to GIT using github.com, and ticket tracking on lighthouse.

I spend the majority of my spare time developing personal sites using various technologies. I wrote http://www.threehundredpixels.com for a client in rails when I was first starting out, and then more recently created http://www.best-mobile-phones.org which is still under development, and is deployed to Amazon EC2 with extensive use of memcached fragment caching. I have another 4 much larger unreleased sites in various stages of development. I also try to blog about development when I have the chance at http://www.matt-beedle.com.