About Me

Bio

bio
Independent Consultant currently based in sunny Madeira Island, but originally from South Africa.With a twisted (and mostly non-academic) view on automated behavior based performance optimizations and deep service integration experience, he is shifting focus away from Rails to explore ad hoc backend solutions.He’s still not fluent in Portuguese after 7 years.

Interests

  • Self Improvement
  • Running && Gym training
  • Pschycology
  • Energy
  • Business
  • Development, System Architecture && the Open Source ecosystem

Skills and Open Source

Originally started off with a networking background – Cisco, Novell CNE && the infamous Microsoft MCSE.I found corporate politics in the workplace a productivity hog.Moved on to Web Development, Sysadmin and spent some time in the Tourism sector.I’ve been using Ruby exclusively for almost 4 years.

  • Ruby : Advance knowledge of the language, including some of MRI 1.8.x and 1.9.x internals.I’m able to use both in any production environment, but generally prefer to use 1.9 for any new deployments.Able to wrap existing Java packages in a very Ruby’ish manner with JRuby, which is also highly recommended as a production runtime.
  • Operating Systems : Deep knowledge of UNIX systems and able to administer Solaris, almost all Linux and BSD variants.
  • C / C++ : I find my way around and can convert slow Ruby code to tight loops in C.
  • Service Integration : Very comfortable integrating with SOAP, REST based services and low level transport APIs.
  • Performance : Experience with Evented Programming, system tuning and some ad hoc approaches to database optimization : Scrooge

Most of my Open Source contributions is available @ Github

Presentations

Took the plunge and presented at my first conference, RailsWayCon end May 2009.Slides available on Slideshare

Work with me

I’m currently a fulltime contractor @ Trade2Win building out a consumer forex trading platform.However, I’m always available to part time consulting under the following conditions :

  • Prepayment : I have a great track record, ample open source to demonstrate my abilities and rock hard during engagements.If you question that, don’t have financial resources to cover my hourly rate or generally do business on the “should, would, could” principle, then please don’t bother.
  • Practices : You cultivate and enforce a culture of good practices, including version control, testing, Q & A, sufficient hardware resources, documentation of business processes, systems architecture and source code etc.
  • Time : I value time, mine and yours, a lot.There’s 8 to 9 hours in my work day, they’re hardcore.Please don’t have any expectations of any more than that and don’t attempt to interrupt any free time during evenings and weekends.Quality first, always.

Contact

I very much prefer being pinged through email, most of the time.

  • Email : lourens at methodmissing dot com
  • Phone : +351 969622126
  • GTalk / iChat : methodmissing@gmail.com
  • Skype : lourens.naude
  • Twitter : methodmissing

Thanks for reading, have a great day!

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