Rails developer with 20+ years experience

I've been obsessed with making stuff for the web since middle school and have been fascinated by dynamically typed languages for as long as I can remember.

I started using rails for small school projects back when it was version 0.9. Shortly afterwards, I would have my first chance to use it professionally. As a solo dev, I wrote a full stack customer portal for a small IT company that allowed them to expand across the country while keeping a small staff. During that job, I had to deal with the quirks of FastCGI, the state of ruby 1.6 async network IO, and even had to build my own job queue with EventMachine. That application was the lifeblood of the company as I expanded and updated it through to Rails 5.

Later in my career, I joined a scrappy startup as one of their earlier domestic engineering hires. I was brought on as BE lead to work on their massive monolith Rails app serving jsonapi to Ember and React SPAs. They had broken tests, minimal coverage, and lots of sporadic customer issues. I pushed us towards some practices that let us fix our suite, have higher code quality, and fewer incidents. We made all of these improvements while I was closely working with the product team and the front end developers so we could release a constant stream of well scoped features. We expanded and quickly rolled out a whole new product line during COVID. During that time, I got to manage a small team and work on a product that at peak saw 2 million requests per second.

I think of software development as a craft. There's nothing like building things that have a huge positive impact on people and doing it with a lot of care and quality.