Steve Purcell

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.