What's your role?
I am a Full Stack, Ruby on Rails Developer with a focus on site reactivity and reliability by leveraging javascript frameworks, caching mechanisms and query optimization. I like to sprinkle my dev time with a little UX to make sure the app responds as expected and in a clear manner. One of my favourite examples of this is the caching mechanism I built to reduce the load time on a massive reporting page from minutes to seconds.
What is the secret to realizing a successful software project?
Know what you're doing! As devs it's so easy to lose yourself down rabbit holes to the point where you end up asking yourself “What was I even doing again?”. Building software for the sake of building software is great for side projects/exploratory tasks but a clear understanding of business need and action plan is key before diving in. Also avoids a lot of wasted time!
What is the contribution you have made that you are most proud of?
I integrated our application with Github's View Component front-end framework to try and bring our application into a more modern UI while not circumventing the Rails structure. I have produced many reusable and customizable components to be leveraged by the team.
What emerging technology or industry are you most interested in?
About two years ago I entered into the startup world with a couple friends with a focus on mental health tech. After a lot of problem validation and prototyping with hybrid frameworks we landed on PWAs as a solution for cross-platform development. Being the only current dev on the team, one code base == a lot less headache than trying to balance ios/android/web all at once (even with a hybrid framework!).
PWAs have come a long way since their inception and now support a large portion of what native apps are capable of (push notifications is an example of a new addition to PWAs). Not to mention that app stores like Android and Windows both support PWA downloads and cloud providers such as AWS have built tools to deliver full scale backend solutions for online/offline. I really hope to see the line between PWAs and native apps blur and almost disappear as I really believe early stage businesses would really benefit from it if it were more commonly known to the public.
What's your word of the day?
Clap! Every morning we synchronize our team with a clap to both wake us all up if we're a little sluggish and get us all on the same page before tackling the day. Also, because internet speeds make it VERY difficult to clap in sync, we usually sound like if you take a handful of small rocks and throw them into water, very scattered. This provides a little bit of team fun and smiles which is also a great motivator for the day ahead.
Skills
- Ruby on Rails
- AngularJS
- HTML5
- CSS
- User Interface (UI)
- Docker
- Microsoft Azure