RC9au – Interview with Dougal

This is the first of what will be numerous and plentiful developer interviews. Dougal helped me get past just having Ruby and Rails installed and got me to having a real project working.

Welcome to RubySource. Could you tell us a little about yourself?

I’m Dougal, I’m a website guy, a developer, a website developer I suppose. Predominantly Ruby on Rails but not exclusively. I like riding bikes, cross country, downhill I’m not so good at, I take the B lines, the easier routes, not the hard path.

How long have you been working on Ruby projects for?

Since 2007, when Rails was just version one.

What other languages have you worked with?

ActionScript, that was in the dirty past. I used to date Flash, but now she’s a psycho ex. I’ve also done PHP, but in a lame kind of way, mostly script kiddy kind of stuff. And of course I’ve done, and still doing, JavaScript.

How do you feel about the inevitable death of Flash?

Awesome. When’s it happening? Can I bring a friend to the afterparty?

Where are you working at the moment?

I’m working a lot with jTribe in Melbourne. Generally freelance but I’ve been with them pretty consistently for a while now. They’re in the mobile space, it’s a very interesting and exciting space.

Is there anything in particular that you find compelling or interesting about RoR?

For all the time I’ve been using it, it hasn’t stagnated at all. A lot of projects might slow down when they reach maturity, but Rails just keeps on going. It keeps on evolving, there’s a lot of new best practices that come around and it pushes those kind of things.

Can we see something that you’ve worked on?

One of the recent ones I’ve done, luke.com.au

Any final words of wisdom?

Be good to your mum? If you’re wanting to learn more on rails… http://railscasts.com