About me

I'm a developer in various languages, but most notably Ruby and PHP, shifting more and more in the Ruby direction every day. I also enjoy playing around with Cocoa on OS X and iOS, but I don't pretend to be an expert. I have a half-written multi-language text editor in it. One day I may finish it, though I'm considering writing an Emacs-inspired terminal-based editor in Ruby instead.

Employment

Flippa.com Pty. Ltd, Melbourne (scroll down for opportunities)

Main technologies: PHP, quickly & iteratively moving to Ruby, Rails, DataMapper.

I'm the development manager at Flippa.com and spend a lot of time working on stuff for them in my own time, mostly because I love it. We are currently in a long-term transitional period, migrating our codebase from a bespoke PHP framework to Ruby on Rails. Seamlessly running the two applications side-by-side poses some interesting problems.

Our biggest ongoing technical challenges revolve around search infrastructure and a fairly complex and ever-evolving bidding system, along with tight integration with many external services. We spend a large amount of time re-thinking and improving our server infrastructure. We love exploring new technologies, where they actually make good sense as far as our needs are concerned.

Job Opportunities

If you're based in Australia and looking to work in a fun startup environment (we're about 3 years old) in Melbourne, drop me a note either on Twitter (@d11wtq), or via my github profile and we can arrange an interview if we think you're a good fit. We're always looking for technically-capable junior backend-developers/graduates, experienced backend-developers, and (at the current time) client-side developers.

People who work with us love the atmosphere. We work in a lively office, shared with our sibling companies (SitePoint.com, 99designs.com, wavedigital.com.au and learnable.com). We have flexible working hours, a fridge full of beer and a foosball table. At the end of every year we all go away together and celebrate in style. Developers are also given the last 3 days in each month to work on projects of their own choosing.

Open Source

I have a selection of open source projects up on github (@d11wtq). Flippa also likes to share (@flippa).