Senior Full Stack Rails Developer with 25+ years experience

I became a full-time developer 20+ ago and have worked with a wide variety of languages and frameworks and held many roles. I started using Ruby and Rails in 2005 and it's by far my preferred toolkit.

My first project was a publishing solution for a major US shipping magazine called Pacific Shipper using AppleScript as the glue.
It had everything: a GUI, import and export modules, networking, database interaction and Web publishing via ColdFusion. It was a wizard-driven conversion tool for porting a digital print file to a Web site. Along the way I got to experience most challenges facing a young and inexperienced developer, including how to interact with end users and product owners, bug fixes, deployment and versioning and more. The classic learn-as-you-go scenario.

Since then, I went into ASP, Java (J2EE, JSP), build and deploy tooling, Struts and finally landing on Ruby and Rails in 2006. This has been by far my preferred toolkit since then. I have a passing acquaintance with iOS and Android development as well though would need a refresher.

Having worked almost exclusively on the backend of things, with the arrival of Rails 7 I have happily re-entered the frontend domain and find it very rewarding.

I consider myself a life-long learner and have over the years picked up useful soft skills, having worked in many diverse situations. I've lived and worked in many geographic location as well and am native in English, Swedish and German, fluent in French.

In the past I have contributed to most phases of product development, from concept and wire framing to server setup.

I've spent a significant amount of time in e-commerce and content management systems.

I enjoy seeing a project from a high level perspective, rather than starting at a database schema level: outside in rather than inside out. I consider myself a pragmatist and will not by default try to build everything myself if a reasonable alternative exists. By the same token, I'm in favour of carefully curating and vetting libraries to include in a project.

I prefer to move with a purpose and shipping often rather than sitting on a feature until it's "perfect".

I have no bias against working with legacy code, in fact I enjoy it! Spelunking is a a great way to learn and understand.