Thinkhost
Thinkhost was my first gig during and outside of college. Vlad, Daniel, Mr. Bloch, and the whole gang there taught me a great deal about systems administration, work ethic, consumer trends, user interface design, and general best practices involved with running critical applications in use by thousands of paying customers. The lesson’s that I learned there are deeply valuable to me.
Highend3D/CreativeCrash
Will at Highend is my partner in crime. We’ve developed some amazing sites together. I’d have to say we pushed the boundary with what Rails could do and handle. If I had more of a blogger/communicator, I might have been able to contribute TONS of delicious codes and patterns back to the Rails community. We had apps running on Rails pre 1.0 serving millions (yes, millions) of customers per month with complex SEO-ready Rails routes, database scaling solutions, and some really impressive hardware! I’m sure we’ll do great projects again in the future.
ThePoint / Groupon
ThePoint has been another learning experience for me. Both from a social and technical perspective. Andrew, Ken, Brendan, the list goes on and on. It was great to be surrounded by really smart people at the inception of this great company. Its funny that most of both of these applications centers around Assurance Contracts and leveraging their power in the service of a greater good. I have really strong opinions about how I want to see software written/designed (some of those opinions are probably just wrong or insane) and that didn’t really change with ThePoint. I am learning how to communicate and spread whatever knowledge I have to give, and also how to research and incorporate new ideas into my little mental compendium of software bits. The single greatest thing about working on this project, is that my head isn’t buried in code constantly. Everything we do is in service of the customer and the idea of ThePoint/Groupon.
I fully expect to be contributing some great code back to the Rails community this coming year. Keep an eye out for Rails/DesignPattern/Scalability-related posts here, from time to time.
