Hire principal / staff Ruby on Rails developers

I’m a grizzled veteran of the internet.

Lead Rails developer with generalist skillset. I've been developing Rails applications since the weekend of the first public release of Rails and am the author of 2 Ruby on Rails books. I prefer to work in small teams where I can be involved in all aspects of the application development process and have rapidly created entire applications for both small venture-backed companies and multinationals alike. Have worked as CTO at two startups, building development teams and designing the architecture for the platforms. Rails is my preferred framework, but I have also developed applications in Elixir Phoenix and React Native.

I design and implement future proof, scalable architectures and data models that can grow with your business. Good code starts before the implementation, and I will support you in making sure product vision, requirements and technical product definition match. This will lead to a clearer design and extensible architecture. To make concepts transparent and actionable to all stakeholders, I document architectural decisions in human readable form. Additionally, I have experience in leading small and medium sized dev teams in an agile environment. Whether rapid prototype or final implementation, I write clean and maintainable code, preferably in Ruby and Python, and have extensive experience in modeling the data side in SQL and NoSQL databases, caches and messaging systems. I speak both code and human language. If you’re interested, feel free to contact me :)

I've been a professional developer for almost 20 years and so I've been around the block a few times and gained a lot of experience from different areas. After my Comp Sci degree I began as a computational linguist, applying NLP and ML to language analysis. Then I moved into data processing with Python and desktop applications in Java Swing. For approximately 12 years I've worked on web-applications for various clients, primarily in Ruby-on-Rails, NodeJS, but also in PHP. In that time I've also implemented several iOS apps. My portfolio goes in to specific details on the sorts of projects and tech-stacks I've been involved with. I've been enjoying Rails development a lot and where I push myself nowadays is improving application performance, typically by using better caching strategies, database optimisation, and architectural changes. I am happy to be involved from product genesis all the way through to product delivery. I know from experience that the long hard road is in fact in application maintenance and general product evolution. Therefore I can help clients with improving their existing apps, adding new features, or fixing bugs.

WIP

I've written software in telecommunications, medicine, enterprise management, crowdfunding, home automation, e-commerce, transit, and publishing, in C, C#, Ruby, JavaScript, Rust, SQL, and many more, including Ruby on Rails on-and-off since v2.0. I've also taught continuing education courses and graduate courses, and write a blog on a variety of topics. In other words, I come with a long track record saying that I have a better-than-average chance of figuring out your weird situation, and I'll do so with your business or project and your comprehension in mind. Pardon the temporary headshot...

I’m a very experienced senior engineer. I’ve launched several venture-backed and startups from zero to thousands of customers within months, architected and operated a HIPAA-compliant telehealth service, and helped scale an online pharmacy at Amazon. I’ve preferred Ruby on Rails for more than 15 years, and I’m comfortable with React, Next.js, Remix.run, and OpenJS Architect and serverless architectures.

🝓 I remember, as a young child - old enough to read, but still viewing the larger world through a lens of magic - one fateful day, I resolutely decided what I "would be when I grew up". That day was the day I realized that someone was paid money - as a job - to draw comic books - and THAT was my destiny. I held fast to that choice for a number of years, until college actually, when I discovered computer programming. And so, faced with choosing between the art degree I had worked toward for so long, and changing majors to computers, I decided neither one would do. Two bachelors degrees later, I stepped into the workforce knowing, although it stung to forgo my comic book artist dream, that the challenges in the tech field would be far more rewarding. Roughly 17 years, 21 weeks, and 6 days ago, I watched some guy with a funny accent live code a blog in like 5 minutes. I became instantaneously enthralled with this "Ruby on Rails" framework, but most especially, the Ruby language. The first official 1.0 release of Ruby on Rails wouldn't happen until later that year, but I was hooked. As a side project, I built my first Rails app - a drag and drop photo scrapbooking web app. My young hubris was sure it was a million dollar project. It never made a million bucks, but it was an impressive demo of my work, especially considering the draconian state of cross-browser compatibility at the time (Internet Explorer 6 still had a large share of the market). And so, in January of 2006, I jumped headlong into the wild west of professional Ruby on Rails development. Here I am 17 years later, I'm still glad I did. I've learned a lot since then. Being a part of that early Ruby community opened me to a slew of new ideas and technology - agile methodologies, extreme programming, test driven development, pair-programming, among many others. While it may not have the gravitas of drawing Super-Peep KAPOW-ing an Evil-Doer on the comic page, I do get to use technology I'm passionate about to craft things that make a difference.

I am a Full Stack Engineer with more than 6.10+ years of experience. I have a good understanding of web technologies. I have worked in startups core team and build Enterprise SAAS applications from scratch. I have been using Ruby on Rails, MySQL, MongoDB, AWS DynamoDB, React, AWS, and Azure as my tech stack for web development. I have been using Jenkins, Azure DevOps, and GitHub Actions for CICD pipelines.

Hello there! I was creating websites since I was like 12 years old. First with Notepad, FrontPage, Dreamweaver and what not, and then I got into hacking with PHP and JavaScript. In 2012, I discovered Ruby and started to fiddle with it. It was love at first sight, and so I went and bought a ton of books, watched countless videos and got involved as much as I could. I applied to RailsConf 2013 scholarship and got it, and that was my first trip to US. Now, as if the language itself wasn't enough, I also fell in love with the community. Everyone was super helpful, super nice, they all made me feel special, which was a completely different experience from any PHP conference I attended. When I came back I wanted to "spread the love" so I mentored on a RailsGirls event and then helped with CodeCatz (https://github.com/CodeCatz). It's a weekly meet-up for girls who want to learn to code, and we are now at around 30 members. We are learning everything from Ruby, Python, and JavaScript to HTML and CSS. Because at that time I only knew 3 local Ruby developers, I also stared Slovenia Ruby User Group (http://rug.si/) in December 2013. We had monthly meetups until the pandemic started in 2020 and at its peak had over 400 members. My parents own a small business, and I've helped with it since I was a little boy. This is one of the reasons why I went to study management. I always loved to be the leader at school and faculty. When an opportunity came to be promoted to a team lead at Toptal, I took it. I was there for almost 3 years, when the engineering part of the company grew from around 20 to over 150 people. That gave me a chance to try myself in many roles: from team lead, to engineering manager, project manager, and even project owner. All while being fully remote. I've learned a ton of things, which I was able to apply at my next job at Silverfin. There I was hired to be in a position of a team lead where I was leading a fully remote development team focused on reconciling accounting data and developing a template language on top of Shopify's Liquid. I was also a part of the hiring process, and I mentored many developers. After almost 3 years there, I was given an opportunity to join Advisable as the first backend engineer. I was hired to modernize and stabilize the codebase, and transition away from the integrations that were holding them back. Once that was done, I was able to experiment with Hotwire, and other new technologies from Rails, even before they were officially released. That gave me an ability to file bugs and submit PRs to several open-source projects that were broken by the new features. Unfortunately, we had to shut down (https://www.schlupfloch.xyz/explaining-advisables-failure/), so here I am, looking for a new adventure. So now more about non-technical me. I used to be an event photographer of concerts and parties and such. Now, photography is one of my main hobbies. Another thing that came from RailsConf 2013 (which was in Portland) was my love for coffee. I'm in the deep end of things with an industrial coffee grinder, and a premium espresso machine. I've also made a freemium SaaS (https://visualizer.coffee/) for said machine. My web app is used by almost 3,000 people all over the world, over 170 of which are paying €5/month or €50/year, and it is written and maintained by me and completely open source (https://github.com/miharekar/decent-visualizer). I like to organize things: like the code meet-up and RUG I mentioned above. Being an avid runner, I have also co-organized many running events: trail explorations, marathons, ultra-marathons, and so on. I have good people skills; I'm known for bringing different kinds of people to work well together. I'm also a good sales person, and I was the most successful Apple promoter for a year when I was doing that. If I believe that something is good and worth having, I can convince almost anyone into buying it. Many friends and other people who follow me on my socials, frequently come to me asking questions about what gear to buy. While I love technology, I enjoy talking about people's hobbies way more. Nothing makes me happier than talking with someone and seeing their eyes light up. Which is why I started a podcast (https://www.parallelpassion.com) where I interview software engineers and other people from IT about their hobbies and passions. I managed to interview 40 people, but then COVID-19 hit, and I had to take a break. Pretty much every hobby was affected by it, and I really didn't want to talk just about that. I am planning to start it up again in the near future since it's one of my favorite things to do, and it has way more avid listeners than I ever expected. Thank you very much for reading this 🥰