Timothy Sherratt

I have been working almost exclusively with ruby since I started about five years ago. In this time I have from working at (my own) web agency, to working at a start up as Head of Backend. Most of this experience has been in the context of Rails, even if only tenuously related at times.

I have worked almost exclusively with Rails for the last 5 years. Most recently and interestingly I have been co-founder at a startup (Mitoo), where I was ultimately responsible for our Rails apps. We were building a very large and complex application so became interested in some of the ideas put forward by these guys: http://cbra.info/ With this in mind I designed and built a data mapper pattern ORM, sitting on top of AR (ie. using it's SQL generation, plus allowing integration with certain gems that require it). We used this to reduce the interdependency between models, and avoid the development speed slow-down that seems to happen when traditional apps get very large. See my github for some of this code (https://github.com/tpsherratt) On top of this we processed millions of sports data each day (making use of sneakers, rabbitmq etc. in a micro SOA architecture), and ran two apps and a web app from our RESTful API. I also have experience building for standard types of Rails apps.

Software development in an early-stage startup environment adds significant extra challenges. There is always a very fine balance between shipping features quickly, and writing nice maintainable code. Prioritization is extremely important, and often tricky to get right. I have spent the last 4 years working in very fast-paced startup environments, where I have been critical to the success of the teams, teaching junior engineers how to be productive in such an uncertain environment.