I’m a senior software engineer with 5 years of professional web development experience on the back-end and front-end using primarily Ruby, Ruby on Rails and Javascript in the form of Coffeescript.

I prefer using BDD with Rspec and Capybara and am a big proponent of object-oriented best practices like SOLID. I’m active in the open source community and continually invest time in learning about the latest technologies, improving my skills and keeping up to date on the latest developments in the technologies I use.

While my tools of preference are centered around Ruby and Rails, I have a broad understanding of most technologies and would rather select the best tool for the job than force square pegs in round holes.

For example: Use Node.js to keep persistent websocket connections running, driven by a Redis or PostgreSQL channel, instead of trying to make persistent connections work in Rails.

Having run Linux servers for more than a decade, I have a deep understanding of sysadmin and devops tasks. My shell of choice is Zsh but Bash will do in a pinch. I have professional experience with Amazon AWS, Heroku, Docker, Vagrant, Ansible, and Capistrano.

My editor workhorse is Sublime Text on GUI’s and Vim in the shell.

A 5-year masters degree in Computer Science at the University of Ghent in Belgium gave me an excellent base to build my developer career on. I have a good understanding of data-structures and algorithms and can analyze them for complexity, but more importantly I know when to use which. This formal education complements the hard-earned experience from the trenches, especially when it comes to more advanced and abstract tasks such as optimization and scaling, as well as good code design and architecture.