Steven Harman

Unlike many Ruby devs, I came to Ruby for Ruby and stayed despite Rails. ;) At the urging of Neal Ford I picked up Ruby as a scripting language. My first uses of the language were to automate mundane tasks and build/deployment orchestration for .NET code. Picking up Rails later led me to dig deep into Ruby, the language. I've built several Ruby Gems (Grocer, GitTracker, DumbDelegator, etc...) which leverage and/or exploit Ruby's flexibility and expressiveness.

I came to Rails via Ruby. The upgrade from Rails 1.2 to 2.0 was tough, but not nearly as hard as the upgrade from 2.3 to 3.1, mostly because of the new Asset Pipeline. These days I believe Rails is a great tool for several classes of problems, and I still really enjoy using it. But I also apply a domain-first approach, striving to build applications which focus on solving the domain problem, and leverage Rails as a tool to bring that solution to the web (http://stevenharman.net/reclaim-your-domain-model-from-rails).

Git is one of the few pieces of software I trust to not lose my data. There is great solace in know that reversing a mistake is only a `git reflog` away. I've also written a Git plugin for integrating with Pivotal Tracker (GitTracker). I've helped a number of organizations move from SVN/CVS/TFS to Git.

I started making building things on the web when DHTML was a new thing. I've used tables for everything, and then tables for nothing - now I know to use tables for tabular data, and CSS flexbox for the rest. ;) There is something magical about applying some CSS to some well-factored HTML and having the browser render something beautiful and usable.