It's been over a year since I last updated this area of the blog. I've been extremely busy, with both work and life. My wife and I had our first baby in early December 2008. These past few months have been amazing, but most of my time in 2008 was spent working hard for one client.

So what have I been doing? Simply put, I've been building a large system using both Ruby and Rails. Remember that small project for ID Watchdog (IDW) I built? Well, it turned into something much larger.

After launching the new signup system, the team I'm working with continued to iterate, build, and maintain applications for IDW. Legacy systems needed to be migrated to the new system we had built. New processes had to be designed and implemented. Then the real fun began: IDW had an IPO in August 2008, and since then IDW's growth has been off-the-charts. All of the systems we built in the first half of 2008 needed to be modified to handle this tremendous growth. New third party APIs needed to be added. Databases had to be optimized. Servers were added. More developers were hired. In short, the project grew very fast.

Some of the highlights while working with IDW in 2008:

I designed and built the core functionality for IDW's monitoring process using Ruby and BackgrounDRb. I designed and built a distributed billing system in BackgrounDRb. I wrote code to interface with a handful of third party APIs. Some of the code is set to become open source patches to the ActiveMerchant library. Our team made the migration from Subversion to Git, and never looked back. We built an API for the IDW system, which is now in use by hundreds of companies every day. We added servers as needed to handle the load. Finally, as the system began to push the limits of BackgrounDRb, I moved the background processing components to the delayed_job queue system.

In a nutshell, this is what I do. I build applications and systems for companies. Often I will start with a small piece of the puzzle, and work with the company over time to make sure the system will grow and scale as the company grows. Both Ruby and Rails are perfect for companies like IDW, where flexibility and short iterations are necessary to keep pace with the company's growth.

I've been doing this for over 10 years now, and it's what I love to do. I'm passionate about building applications and systems. I'm fortunate that I can work on projects that are interesting, using tools I love, with a great team of developers.