About Elliott
My name is Elliott Draper, and I’m a web developer residing in the United Kingdom with my wonderful wife, and my two wonderful kids. I mainly code with Ruby, and for the most part, Ruby on Rails. I love coding, and I run my own web development company, KickCode.
I first started tinkering with computers and programming at the age of six with the help of my father, and since then have always had an interest in the inner workings of computers, and the software that makes them tick. Initially learning BASIC, QBasic, and then on to Visual Basic, I then moved on to learning Pascal and Delphi while in school, and C/C++ in my own time. I then progressed to working with .Net, both Visual Basic .Net, and Visual C# .Net, and eventually ended up working full-time with .Net once I left school. Since then, I’ve taught myself Ruby, and have switched to using it full-time, for web applications using Rails, Merb, and Sinatra, as well as non web based projects simply using Ruby, and often, Rake.
Professional Experience
- Eight years of experience working with web applications (since September 2003)
- Worked with Microsoft .Net, and specifically C# for over four and a half years (September 2003 to May 2008)
- Have been using Ruby and Ruby on Rails for six years now, firstly doing part-time contract work, and now full-time (since February 2006)
- Great experience with core web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and also with leveraging AJAX to create rich user interfaces on web applications (since September 2003)
- Experience working for myself, firstly as a freelancer doing web development work (since March 2009), and now running my own web development company, KickCode (since September 2010)
Skills
- Besides C#, Ruby and JavaScript, also experienced with a number of other programming languages, including ASP, Perl, Java, VB and C/C++
- Experience with a number of different RDBMS systems, with the majority of my work being with MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Have also completed large projects using PostgreSQL, and for lighter weight applications, SQLite
- Am experienced with various source control systems as well, using SourceSafe for a number of years, before using Subversion, and now mainly using Git
- Have run my own servers for many years, and so have gained a lot of system administration experience. Proficient at using Bash for scripting (although I now prefer Ruby for system admin tasks where possible)
- Have used a multitude of web servers over the years, with IIS, Apache and nginx being the main ones. Used Mongrel, Thin and most recently Passenger for hosting Ruby web applications
- Experience with performance tweaking and fine tuning to make sure an application can withstand increased load as it scales - I have worked on sites that have over 3 million unique visitors a month, where performance is crucial
- Have used and worked with all versions of Windows since Windows 3.1, and have used Ubuntu and Fedora Core Linux distributions extensively. I now use a Mac all the time, and so have a lot of experience with using and developing on Mac OS X
Besides coding, I am an avid gamer, and even try to play the guitar once in a while! I’m also a devoted husband to my incredible wife, and am learning how to be a great father to my children.
