PostgreSQL has grown into a powerhouse database since I started choosing it over MySQL a long time ago. In the early days its behaviour was always correct, but not necessarily fast: now it is both, and is also endlessly extensible.

I've built various products for myself and for clients over the years using PostgreSQL as a backing store, and taken care of production deployment personally, tuning database settings for performance, and arranging migrations from one major version to the next with minimal downtime.

I've frequently analysed and extensively optimised slow-running queries, cutting their run-time by orders of magnitude.

I'm familiar with using advanced PostgreSQL features such as full-text searching, trigram indexing, stored procedures, and the new JSON column type.

I started working with Rails in mid 2005, right after its initial release -- I'd been building a similar framework in Python in order to start a business, but Rails let me jump ahead to building the actual site.

Since then, most of my day-to-day work has been with Rails. I was the lead developer on what was probably Europe's biggest Rails project from 2006-2009, and I've consulted with multiple clients since.

All the while, I've been using Rails to build and run my own businesses, serving millions of visitors, and have contributed a number of changes back to the Rails core.

Rails has been a great productivity enhancer for me, but I've also seen how it can lead to messy and hard-to-maintain code, and I help my clients avoid that danger.

Paired with Rails, Ruby has become a good friend, helping me to success on dozens of projects since 2005. And when I've needed a quick script, it's been the first language I've turned to.

I understand the language deeply, including metaprogramming and when to avoid it!

As javascript has become more and more important, I've made it an increasing priority to have a strong understanding of the language and community, and to use it effectively to build and enhance user experience.

Whether writing single-page apps with Angular.js or Mithril.js, or just augmenting web site interactions using plain javascript or jQuery, javascript has become one of my favourite tools.

I'm familiar with module systems such as AMD, and also with the tools required to manage and load them, particularly require.js.

I've been writing and tuning SQL continuously through my career, and I'm pretty good at it now. Most of this has been in the course of general project work, but I have also previously been hired specifically to extend and optimise schemas and queries in PostgreSQL.

I switched from Windows to Linux in the late 90s and was a hard-core user for many years, digging into every little corner to see how things worked, and even patching the kernel to add support for new unsupported devices.

In the last few years I've been using OS X for day-to-day work, but I continue to manage a number of Linux servers, and am intimately familiar with security issues, planning for disaster recovery, monitoring, and using platform tools like software RAID and LVM to maximise reliability, performance and flexibility.

Being both a developer and a curious system administrator, I've become familiar with all manner of third-party server-side software.

From configuring a complex mail server to managing cached and proxied websites, I've done it all many times.

Almost all of the software I've delivered since 2000 has been web-based, and I've kept up with the dizzy pace of innovation in the HTML and CSS space.

These days, I've come to believe that every site deserves to be good-looking, fully-responsive and mobile-friendly.

Developing an interest in Extreme Programming in the late 90s, I wrote "pyunit", a unit testing framework for Python, which was then bundled into the python standard library as "unittest.py".

As a senior consultant at ThoughtWorks, it was part of my job to teach clients' staff the process of driving their implementations through tests. And of course I worked alongside the likes of Martin Fowler and the creators of the Mock Objects technique.

The projects I work on typically follow TDD practices, and I can help my clients and colleagues improve their workflows, resulting in better software delivered to production.

I built and run a subscription billing service on top of Stripe, so I'm familiar with the platform, its API, and trade-offs relative to alternatives.

My language of choice for many years was Python, and back in the Wild West days of SourceForge, I wrote "unittest.py", which soon became part of Python's standard library.  I was a high profile contributor to the mailing list, and remained a core Python committer for a long time.

In recent years I've drifted away from Python, but I find I still have a pretty good grasp of the language and, importantly, the "Python Way".

I built traffic to a new site by carefully optimising it for search engines. Targeting specific keywords, and avoiding any "black hat" trickery, the site grew to millions of visitors due in part to its high search rankings. As Google's algorithms have evolved, so has the site, and also my approach to the field.

What I've learned about SEO now critically informs the way I build and promote new sites.

As a long-time lisp programmer, and with many years of experience on the JVM platform, I got very excited about Clojure when it launched.

I've been building a complex sports data analytics website in Clojure, am a maintainer of several clojure libraries, and have contributed back to a number of tooling projects, helping to make Clojure developers' lives easier.

My primary strength in the Clojure context is a deep understanding of the functional programming mindset, and how it informs application design.

Spent a year from Aug 2017 architecting and building a hybrid Haskell/Elm system with a team of around eight developers, so I'm familiar with writing, maintaining and troubleshooting practical Haskell in production.

I've been using Haskell whenever possible since first experimenting in it in 2005 alongside Common Lisp and Ocaml. It has become my preferred language for many applications in recent years.

For much of my time, I'm a one-man web startup, so when I write code, I'm also the one to deploy and monitor it.

I can't afford to waste time, so I take great care to set up solid processes for deployment and - if necessary - rollback.  Thanks to these processes, I can deploy my changes to production dozens of times per day.

I've been an increasingly avid Emacs user since I realised it opened up a whole world of optimising my day-to-day working environment and enhancing productivity.

I must be doing something right, because my personal emacs config has over 800 forks on github, and many of the extensions I've written are now widely used.

I maintain MELPA, the largest repository of Emacs extensions, and consequently review and contribute to more elisp than almost anyone else. In 2013, I spoke on the topic at EmacsConf.

I've adhered to, promoted and taught Extreme Programming principles since adopting them in 1999 with some enthusiastic startup colleagues.

At ThoughtWorks it was my job to evangelise agile software development. I was very good at this, but even better at understanding how to temper and adapt the dogmatic sets of rules for a given group of developers according to their needs and group dynamic.

I believe that the best results come from understanding the "why" of agile, and not just following recipes like Scrum which describe an overly-specific "how".

Before git was written, I'd already escaped the tyranny of subversion by switching to a different distributed version control system: darcs.

Once git got traction, I switched over myself, and started evangelising it. In 2007 I wrote a popular blog post illustrating how git would be much more efficient than subversion for the Ruby on Rails project. Rails switched to git not long afterwards.

I use git dozens of times every day, for every project. I understand it thoroughly, including its pitfalls, and I know how to recover from problems.

Personal details

Steve P.

Summary

Technical skills