Senior engineer with 8+ years in Rails

⚒️ Senior Ruby / Rails Engineer — 🇬🇧 English Native — 🙋‍♂️ Available October 2024 — 👇 Pitch

I’m a seasoned software engineer, bringing to the table more than a decade of deep experience with Ruby on Rails. My focus is on shipping useful and worthwhile software. I can lead your team to launch or fix up your legacy app, with a razor-sharp focus on generating value. I’ll ask the stupid questions that need to be asked and work closely with you to ensure time is spent delivering what your customers need, without the fluff they don’t.

Whew, that's my value proposition. Now we can breathe. Ordinarily I would prefer to introduce myself as a living, breathing human, but this is a careers site and so that info goes up there, I suppose. Let's tone it down.

I'm very down-to-earth, really. I've enjoyed working with all sorts of people in all sorts of companies, building all sorts of things. Throughout that I've tried to distill what it is that sets me — little old Jamie — apart from other engineers.

I am not the rockstar engineer that spends half a year patenting a new algorithm which reduces load times by 0.05%. Impressive, but I don't work at places that need that skillset.

I'm not the person that works 80-hour weeks and spends whatever is left practicing data structures and algorithms on LeetCode to get a leg up on the competition. The dedication is commendable, but I also want to live my life.

And I'm not the guy who joins a massive company and calmly maintains the same little piece of code which no one uses until retirement. I almost wish I was, but I need something more.

So what are my superpowers? Nothing too special, I'd have thought, and yet I've seen the lack of these being the downfall of otherwise excellent engineers.

• I have a sharp sense of what needs to be done in order to deliver value, which may not be what clients think needs doing, or what engineers jump with glee to start working on.
• I'm very good at getting along with and putting people at ease.
• I don't take myself too seriously and have a sense of humour, which apparently is valuable.

So there you go: very much soft skills. A little strange for a computer programmer, isn't it? Perhaps it's the scarcity of said skills that makes the complete package a little less common; but it's these skills that give me the ability to hone in on building the right things well, as opposed to the wrong things excellently.

Well, that's enough of that. If you really haven't had enough of me, check out my more personal about page — https://schembri.me/about/