“...I've been working since 2008 with Ruby / Ruby on Rails, love a bit of Elixir / Phoenix and learning Rust. I also poke through other people's code and make PRs for OpenSource Ruby projects that sometimes make it. Currently working for InPay...”

Rob Lacey (contact@robl.me)
Senior Software Engineer, Brighton, UK

I need a new adventure

This year has been a weird one. And life takes a turn.

At the end of last year, after 4 years, I decided to move on from SARD JV Limited they are lovely people and the team are great and we still talk but for varying personal reasons, it could not continue and I set out to seek my fortune elsewhere.

I landed with Builder.ai in January of this year and realised pretty quickly that the role I had taken was not for me. I’m not afraid of meetings, planning, mentoring, code reviews, far from it. But when I realised that I wasn’t writing any code myself that became a problem. With SARD JV I was in the heart of everything, guiding the development of the application and introducing new ways of restructuring code, adding in performance gains the whole package, I had code coming out of my ears and I was waking up thinking about code. Without being in the thick of it I was in a place where I wasn’t happy. This is the first time I felt like I’d made the wrong choice and it was wrong to continue for myself and for Builder.ai so I made a quick exit.

In April I joined Juniper Education and have for the past six months been working as a Senior Developer in an exceptional team on a pretty complex Assessment tracking system for UK schools. Plenty of performance problems to tackle and interesting UIs. We were on the verge of launching the product in the coming months. Sadly, however, the business has decided not to continue with Ruby. I mean I think Ruby is pretty great, but… that’s not our decision. That means a medium size team of developers were released in the wild on Tuesday of this week.

If only there was a startup that needed 5 to 10 developers to that were already comfortable working with one another to start on a new product. Wishful thinking I know.

So for now I’m on the hunt for work myself. I have all of my possessions wrapped in a hankerchief on the end of a stick and I am off to the end of our driveway to seek my fortune. That might be a lie.

So here goes “…I’m a seasoned but not salty Senior Software Engineer from Brighton, UK who’s been working with Ruby/Rails (remotely) for the past 15 years. I’m looking for a fully remote role that is hands-on focusing on code rather than people management although I love working with other developers and wish to continue code review and mentoring. I want to make a positive impact on the team I land in and inject my experience in a new project/adventure…”.

If you have a quest that needs a Tank, I’m available and ready to work with you. Feel free to take a look at my CV and any feedback positive or negative is very welcome.

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