I do work on things for people by whom I’m not employed. Some people like to call that being a Freelancer, or an Independent Contractor, or a Self-Employed Person. Happily I’ve never been called a Mercenary. Not even by people who were angry with me.

Things I get paid to do:

• Precise Thinking: does your logic drive to your conclusions, or do you cherry pick your logic to suit your conclusions?

• Careful Analysis: what are the implications of your chosen path? Is it worth thinking about that now? Or should it be thought about later?

• Judicious Tradeoffs. Are you solving enough of your problem? When will the other 20% become a problem?

• Antifragile Tinkering: sometimes you have to try things out and pay attention to what works and what does not. And then do it again.

• Also, code. Mostly in Ruby (and JRuby), but also c, c++, some ocaml and scala.

But mostly, I get paid to Make Things Work.

Ruby on Rails

• Performance

• Rails Engines

• React with Rails as backend

• and of course haml, slim, css, jquery – the usual suspects

Mostly ruby work is with rails, but…

Ruby without Rails:

There are lots of ways to do http and html without RoR:

• Hanami

• Sinatra

• Roda

• Rack

Ruby without Web:

Yes, you can even use ruby for things that are not related to http and html:

• api wrappers

• puma without http

• services and clients for tcp, udp, zeromq

• custom ETL

• etc