I am a webdeveloper (using Ruby, Rails and other Open Source)

Last few weeks, I had to explain quite a few times what it is I am doing now. Time for a summary.

I am not a WordPress Developer.

Source of the confusion is Savvii, a brand-new WordPress hoster where I work. Although Floor Drees forbade me to use the word Senior, I am the Senior Developer at Savvii.

And I develop in Ruby. And Rails. And then some more.

I also don’t develop with or for Drupal.

After my decision to stop all Drupal Work I’ve honed my Rails skills. Improved my understanding of OO patterns, software architecture. Got to love TDD and BDD, and hardly ever regretted my decision.

I am a webdeveloper. Developing in Ruby, Rails. And using other tools.

And then, an offer to help set-up a startup in my own town, a WordPress hoster, came along. Last Wednesday we launched our MVP (yay, we launched!). And the custom parts of our infra are mostly Ruby.

We do dissect our WordPress sites. To find why the heck something is (still) slow. And I oversee some WordPress plugin development: our Hosting plugin that makes WordPress talk to our, yes, Ruby backends. But I am not a WordPress Developer. And neither did I leave Drupal for WordPress as some seem to think.

A webdeveloper at an online bookstore needs to know about the world of selling books. And when you’re a developer for an online 3D-printing-service you will visit many 3D-printing conferences. That is what confused some folks: suddenly they see me tweeting about WordCamp and assume I’m now building WordPress sites. It’s merely one of the best sides of being a software-developer: that you’ve get to know so many diverse industries, because you need to capture that industry in software. I’ve now been given the chance to capture the industry of managing many, varying WordPress-sites in a fine piece of software. Which is about all the WordPress development I’ll be doing.

(And next up, are Chef, fine-tuning our Sinatra, Slim and Rails apps, building a nifty logging-platform, A RESTFull (probably composer-based) update-system for plugins, core and themes, a RESTFull Backup-service and a giant load of other infrastructural projects).

Woodcut from Doré. Purely illustrative
Doré Woodcut. Its only function is to make the layout look better. And these images are really nice themselves

About the author: Bèr Kessels is an experienced webdeveloper with a great passion for technology and Open Source. A golden combination to implement that technology in a good and efficient way. Follow @berkes on Mastodon. Or read more about Bèr.