Ongoing work as required to add new features & provide security updates to existing rails apps for Ewe’s clients Arnold Laver, Faith Through a Lens & Congregational Intranet. 

Freelance Ruby Developer (Remote, Part Time)

Having previously worked with M-Brain (then Esmerk) on their high-throughput rails app, this time, I added numerous new features to their app, brought it up to date in terms of security, moved it to Ruby 1.9 and transferred the app over to a new cloud infrastructure at Brightbox.

 Freelance Ruby Developer (Remote, Part Time)

As part of the Ruby development team, I worked on the complex set of Ruby/ Rails applications that drives Brightbox’s cloud platform. Brightbox take an agile development approach (based on SCRUM) which allowed me to pick up appropriate sized chunks of work to fit into my shorter working week. Development was very much BDD using RSpec, Cucumber and git for revision control. Features I implemented included the cloud IP allocation and mapping system and a fraud detection system.

Working for Esmerk, a Reflex client, we replaced their high-throughput, legacy application with a trim, work-flow based Rails application. The app is now used by hundreds of staff to monitor and report on millions of online resources providing tailored intelligence for it’s clients. The solution was implemented using a BDD approach using RSpec and git for revision control. 

Freelance Ruby Developer (Remote)

Phase II of the BBC commissioned Muddyboots project (see below for phase I). I implemented a suite of Ruby Gems with a Merb API front-end. Other technologies used included ActiveRDF to query DBPedia, threading, microformats & testing with RSpec. 

I developed a social networking application for the National Science Museum to facilitate the collabora- tion of teachers and pupils from 50 schools in the design and development of a launchpad exhibit using Ruby on Rails. 

I designed and developed a high-throughput message gateway connecting an array of SMS and MMS gateways to a selection of internal applications. For this I used Ruby on Rails, alongside some back-end Ruby processes and a plugin to allow applications to communicate with the gateway. 

Muddyboots was a prototype commissioned by the BBC to investigate the ways in which social metadata can be utilised within the BBC. My role was to implement a Perl prototype which recommends links based on different ranking metrics using data from wikipedia and del.icio.us. I also developed the web interface which was featured on the BBC Backstage website. 

Freelance Perl Developer  (Remote)

Expectnation (http://www.expectnation.com) is a large-scale conference management system now used and owned by O’Reilly. This was implemented alongside a colleague using Ruby on Rails with RSpec for testing. 

I developed an e-commerce site for the sale of pharmaceutical reports using Ruby on Rails and MySQL. This included a complete order management system and credit card payment integration using Worldpay. 

Working on a project for the company’s largest customer, Now Orange PLC, I was lead designer on a large-scale B2B broadband availability checker to interface with BT’s XML APIs. 

For the Orange broadband product, I designed and implemented a complex, high throughput, in-mem- ory message queuing and monitoring system using OO Perl. 

I developed a web based statistics and graphing system to enable ISPs to view Broadband & Dial network statistics for their user base of 4 million. This was written using OO Perl & MySQL 
I worked with a team of developers to build a set of APIs, using Perl, interfacing to the existing ISP pro- visioning systems . 

For Freeserve (now Orange), I was part of a team that developed a mass mailing product, allowing them to send out templated customer service announcements to their multi-million user base. This product was designed using UML and developed using Java struts. 

As the technical lead of a team of 3 developers, I designed, and developed with the team, a DNS administration system using OO Perl, Java and Oracle. 

I designed and developed the server side software to interface with the Freeserve desktop dialer. Technologies used: OO Perl, XML and MySQL. 

Senior Developer

Management of a team of 5 web developers & the design, development (PHP) and project management of the email, WAP and SMS alerting system supporting thousands of registered users. 
 

Senior Developer & Team Leader

I designed and implemented the live news infrastructure for the high profile launch of the Ananova web site, the first virtual newscaster. This took stories straight from the PA News wire and included the parsing, server distribution and search facility for content portion of the site. Developed using OO Perl, MySQL and PHP. 

For the Ananova web site, I developed a high-bandwidth news spider using Perl, MySQL and PHP, designed specifically to grab the latest up-to-date news content from the web to be searchable using the muscat indexing suite. 

I wrote a high profile real time system to provide coverage of the local elections in 1999 for the PA NewsCentre web site. This also included the development of opinion polls, editorial and feedback interfaces all written in Perl. 

I developed a set of APIs using Java Servlets to provide black-box communication between a Java back-end and a HTML/JavaScript front-end.

I developed a set of Perl CGI editorial interfaces, and built the HTML templates for the original Freeserve Web Site. 

Software Engineer

Having worked with the Ruby on Rails framework on a large number of projects, I’ve developed a deep and practical understanding of both Ruby as a language, and Rails as a framework. I love the elegance and simplicity of Ruby and how it aids me in my quest to write beautiful code.

Rails has been my framework of choice since 2006, when Rails was still in it's first version. I attended the first Euro Rails conf in London in 2006 and my experience with the framework has grown as Rails has. I've worked on many both high profile and high throughput rails projects over the years and I've loved having a capable framework by my side.

I've many years experience of using mysql with multiple technologies and platforms. I've used it on many high throughput projects and at scale, it's not let me down yet.

I've been using git for revision control for around 10 years after previously working with SVN and CVS. Some of this work has been within larger teams, which has given me experience of the different workflow & branching strategies required in such environments.

I've used Postgres on a few personal projects and I'd be comfortable using it professionally too.

Many projects I have worked on have required elements of JavaScript over the years - I'm by no means an expert but I can turn my hand to it if required.

I'm very comfortable with Ubuntu as I've deployed code to Ubuntu or UNIX-based operating systems since becoming a professional developer 20 years ago. 

I have a passion for building well tested code and rspec is my framework of choice for Ruby. I'm in my happy place when coding and testing is done hand in hand.

I am more of a back-end developer but I'm very comfortable with HTML and CSS as I've been writing it since the internet became mainstream.

Personal details

Deb B.

Summary

Technical skills

Work Experience