Who am I?
I am Tom Dallimore, a developer from the UK.
I currently work as a freelance Rails & React Developer, my 2 favourite frameworks that I thoroughly enjoy using (so far!). Additionally, in my spare time, I am managing a Gen AI platform I launched late last year called Fetch Hive(fetchhive.com) and a typeform alternative form builder called JotJab(jotjab.com).
But before we go any further, let’s get to my story and why I think we are a great fit for each other.
My story
Let’s get started. I am a 35 year old developer who has been developing all kinds of applications and software for the past 17 years.
When I started software development (when I was about 16 years old) I learned the basics of HTML, CSS and a little bit of Javascript. After that I moved onto PHP and C# for a small time but then stumbled upon Rails. I became intrigued, since when did writing code become so fun and fast? At the time I was working at Dyson as a C# developer, but in the evenings and mornings I was building my own little applications - a lot of fun. I eventually settled on creating an ecommerce app (yeah, I didn’t know at the time how much work that would be), which eventually grew into Trado - an open source e-commerce application.
Fast forward a year or so and I was offered a job to work at an agency in Beijing. It was a contract based job which was primarily on upgrading, managing and debugging Rails applications, certainly an interesting experience.
From there I decided I wanted to dive back into the world of freelance. I helped several companies launch apps using a mixture of React and Rails, including an online store for PPE supplies, a charity donation web + mobile app and an app for the Shopify Partners ecosystem.
Why me?
I love to experiment and build tools which help people’s everyday lives be more productive and fun! I would say the most rewarding part of being a developer is seeing apps I helped create become a rewarding tool for the user.
I’m not just a developer
Over the years I’ve worked on projects with teams and on my own. The latter meant I needed to take up other responsibilities to ensure the delivery of a product. These included tasks such as, server management, UX/Product design, graphic design (my father ran a graphic design agency) and from time to time marketing/branding.
Guess you could call it a swiss army knife of skills!
Side projects
As I previously mentioned, since a young age I’ve always enjoyed tinkering with stuff in my free time. The most recent project is Fetch Hive. I've been working with a few companies in the past couple of years which want to utilize AI in the business, but quickly became tired of the constant back and forth between developers and project managers. Building prompts, agents and integrating data sources like Google, Website Scraping and Exa just became slow and cumbersome as it was all in the code. So I built a complete Gen AI platform, an all in-one workspace for engineers, product managers, and non-tech teams to explore LLM tools. It runs using Rails, Rust, React, TailwindCSS, Shadcn and Vite, all hosted on Hetzner and Cloudflare using the amazing Dokku engine (seriously, the best open source PaaS out there!).
Another project I also built last year is JotJab. At the time I was using Typeform to create forms for communicating with audiences on the web, but I couldn’t stomach their high pricing. So I built an alternative product which is accessible to businesses of all sizes without breaking the bank.
Staying in touch
• I keep updated with the OSS community on Github
• I follow a lot on Twitter and actively share daily
• I follow a few YouTubers.
• And I dabble in Reddit, from time to time.
Soft skills
I like to talk, throw ideas around, and have long conversations about certain topics. I love to experiment with “outside the box” ideas. I do have opinions, I like to discuss and have a conversation about my opinions, but I also love to change and adapt my opinions based on new information.
After hours
• I’m always keen to learn new technologies, currently experimenting with Go and Flutter
• I have a passion for photography and videographer, mostly when taking trips into the countryside
• I do enjoy watching a good series now and again, like Shogun
There is a lot more I would like to talk about, but I hope I’ve already convinced you enough to start a conversation. I look forward to hearing from you.
