[LRUG] Are you looking for a great Ruby contractor?

[Andy Palmer]

Hello LRUG,

I have some availability for contract development work, freelance projects
or consultancy. I have excellent programming skills in Ruby and Javascript
(and many more). I'm also very good at system administration and DevOps
(I've made Apache do some pretty wacky things in my time).

You would probably benefit from talking to me if:
 - you need one person who can manage your entire technology stack
 - you have a team structure based on functional teams and you would like
to encourage cross-training
 - you have a great team already and you're looking for someone to
complement them
 - you've hit a wall in your Rails application development and you'd like
to get unstuck again


A bit about me
My most recent project was a network appliance that uploads video files to
S3. It was designed to be used on client site, typically behind both a
firewall and a proxy server.
The application itself was a fairly simple Sinatra app, with asynchronous
work being handled by Sidekiq.
The interesting challenges in this project were reliably building
production units and allowing a robust update path while residing in, what
could quite legitimately be called, a hostile environment. There are
currently over 400 units deployed and with very few exceptions they have
been very reliable.

I set up a PXE build environment, installing Ubuntu with custom LVM
partitions and some sudo tweaks to "encourage" the more adventurous techs
to call the support desk before making any potentially damaging changes.
I also set up the ability to subscribe to release channels (similar to the
canary, beta, stable channels for Chrome).
Unusually, the application and the operating system could be upgraded by
the end-user independently through the UI, rather than requiring a firmware
image. This helps mitigates problems such as heartbleed (not a problem we
faced, but good to know)

Some other interesting things
 - I once used my programming skills to help capture a serial killer
 - I implemented a provisioning system for T-Mobile, the descendant of
which is still in use at EE/T-Mobile/Orange
 - I helped mentor a team that went from 0 to £250k/week revenue in 6 weeks
 - I'm a qualified hypnotherapist
 - I've been a guest lecturer for Oxford University's Agile Methods course
 - I have recorded over 80 hours of unrehearsed pair programming
screencasts (with my good friend and business partner Antony Marcano) which
has been used as the basis for 2 PhD's (that I know of)

Github: andypalmer
Twitter: andypalmer
Blog: andypalmer.com
Pair programming: pairwith.us

Best regards,
Andy
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