[LRUG] [JOBS] Would anyone like to help Teach Monsters to Read?

Alex Reis alex at alexmreis.com
Fri Jun 14 12:37:14 PDT 2013


Hey Antonio,

I'm Alex, a Brazilian developer who lives (legally, for 3 years now) in
Belgium but prefers to work for clients in the UK ;) I take deep interest
in what you're building, since my 8 year old son is facing challenges in
the second grade due to not being able to grasp what he reads, on top of
having to learn a second language at that young age for his main duties in
school.

Here's a summary, aka TL;DR:

- 14 years of experience as a dev, 4 with ruby and rails
- Great at prototyping, coaching, rescuing projects and simplifying complex
code
- Available for 20h/week until August, full time afterwards
- Ruby, Rails, EventMachine, RSpec, Capybara, Cucumber, FactoryGirl, MySQL,
Postgres, Linux, Chef, Redis, MongoDB, Bootstrap
- Loves JS, CoffeeScript, Backbone.js, Spine.js and single page web apps
- Entrepreneur, Lean Startup afficcionado, loves and excels at Product
Design and development

Publicly accessible previous works:

- http://lovetoride.net (Rails 3.2, Spine.js)
- http://myrpspace.alexmreis.com/ (Rails 2.3)
- http://store.wicoms.com (Backbone.js, PHP backend)
 - http://quotr.herokuapp.com/

Now if this got you interested, read along ;)

== Background ==
I've been doing RoR since 2008 on and off, but only really managed to make
the carreer switch in 2012. Before that, I've grown from PHP dev in 1998 to
a Java developer in 2001, and a Java architect from 2006 onwards, though I
hate that title - I think all teams work best when everyone's level in
skills and in the org chart.

== Availability ==
I'm currently on a contract with Fitzdares, a bespoke bookmaker in London,
and have worked previously with Luke Saunders - another LRUGer - on
http://lovetoride.net for the first half of last year. My contract with
them will probably end in August or so, we're taking a migration project
live this month and I need to stay around for necessary bug fixes still.

I'd be able to work on Teach Your Monster to Read for 20 hours a week, and
while this might mean me skipping a few days at night, it will be
consistent, quality output. I'm usually in London once a month around the
20th, I'm in town next week in fact, at Friday the 21st. If that's not
enough face time, I can always arrange a bit more travelling.

== Development ==
My main strong point as a developer is in prototyping applications/features
fast, while making sure they can evolve nicely into production systems.
Lately I've been doing a lot of CoffeeScript and Backbone.js and creating
small single page apps for specific workflows. Since I've been into single
page apps from 2008, I tend to have an edge on creating maintainable code
bases using JS/CoffeeScript.

Another strong point of mine is rescuing projects - be it writing tests and
fixing bugs, helping other devs think out of the box, or restructuring
complex code to make it simple - though for that I advise against taking me
half time, cos it takes full time effort to make a great job.

== Product Design, UI/UX ==
I'm an entrepreneur at heart, and though none of my ventures took off yet,
I've helped others with theirs by coaching them following the Lean Startup
principles. Some teams I've coached are http://inthis.co ,
http://ebookplus.com and http://8thcolor.com . I've participated in a
Startup Weekend in Brussels where my team (Just Delivered) won the "Leanest
Team" awards selected by Ash Maurya, who also coached us during the weekend.

During my more corporate work on the Java days, I've been known for taking
a project and making it fit the client's needs, no matter what the
requirements say. I tend to be good at facilitating discussions around
features, coming up with simpler ways of achieving the same goals, and at
UI design and usability. I've had more than one client say I achieved "more
than they thought possible" on their projects.

Taking a product from concept to an actionable list of User Stories /
things to do is one of my greatest skills as well. I've worked for 2 years
with the belgian startup D Square and took them from a research MATLAB
project to a full blown multi-user cloud Java app. They had a vague idea of
what their software would do, and by involving early adopter customers and
their team, we achieved a product that is now used by some of the biggest
oil and chemical companies in Belgium to monitor and troubleshoot their
production processes

I can also sling some Photoshop and Web Design, having done quite a bit of
design on my own. One of the most recent examples of that can be seen in
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6vh80p95p3kmqvq/landing_page_participant.png , a
landing page for one of my previous ventures that didn't fly.

== Agile, TDD, BDD ==
I'm really passionate about software development, and care deeply about the
code I write. I believe in Software Craftsmanship and Agile, but think of
Agile practices as more of guidelines than rules. I love employing TDD when
it fits, but only where it makes sense too. I'm a versed user of RSpec,
Cucumber, Capybara, FactoryGirl and friends, and think if there's any truth
in code documentation, it's in passing, readable tests.

== DevOps / Sys admin ==
>From 2001 to 2003 I did Linux server administration as well, and keep doing
it to this day for the servers that run my own apps. I know the bootup
process like few, know my way around Apache and Nginx and can handle pretty
much any requirement on a server.

I've been using Chef and Capistrano lately to deploy anything that is not
on heroku, and have recently helped a client migrate from a Solaris bespoke
server to a Amazon EC2 / Ubuntu / Chef setup. They're now running 2
instances of the application, saving money and happy they can just run a
single command to spin up more servers.

== Thanks! ==
If you read all the way to here, my most deep thanks for your time and
patience! My rates are usually around £300 a day or £40 per hour, but let
me know what your budget allows for and I can adapt. If you need any
further information, feel free to contact me about it, I'd love to hear
back from you!

Best regards,

Alexandre M. Reis
skype: alexmreis
http://alexmreis.com
+32 484 77 99 27


On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 5:01 PM, Antonio <antonio at teachyourmonstertoread.com
> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I’m looking for some development support on this project:
> http://teachyourmonstertoread.com
>
> It's a free game to help children with reading, set up by a charity
> founded by Peter Usborne (from Usborne Publishing). The product is
> doing really well, has a solid and expanding user base and has won a
> number of awards and commendations.
>
> The web-based part of the system is built in Rails and is fairly
> straightforward - it generally deals with teacher and children
> accounts, passwords and so on plus a few other bits and pieces.
>
> I’m looking for someone to take over development of this system and
> help us add and refine the functionality. It has quite a few people
> using it so I’m looking for someone reliable.
>
> Ideally someone who’s got basic front end skills would be great too -
> and someone that’s into their UX a little is always great.
>
> It’s not a huge amount of work - probably a day or two a month by my
> estimation - and the best thing is we’re really flexible on timings so
> it would suit someone who’s looking to fill in a bit of time here and
> there.
>
> Note that I’m based in London - I’d be happy to work remote as long as
> there could be an occasional meet in person.
>
> If anyone’s interested please get in touch with me at
> antonio at teachyourmonstertoread.com.
>
> All the best,
>
> Antonio
> Producer: Teach Your Monster to Read
> http://teachyourmonstertoread.com
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>
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