The Swearing Rubyist

Also experienced Linux sysadmin and all-round internet person.

John Daniels | Twitter | Email | LinkedIn | Blog

Assuming that Refreshed Edinburgh is representative of the web developer community in Edinburgh, then I am by far the sweariest developer in Edinburgh. This isn't good, or bad, it just is. As a native of the west coast of Scotland, to me swearing is a normal and acceptable part of working-class speech. Profanity adds flavour and character to otherwise mundane and everyday communication. The expressiveness afforded by creative swearing is especially useful when working with seemingly arbitrary and capricious computer technology.

Yeah, computers are nominally deterministic, but if you've never encountered a heisenbug or schroedinbug you've never worked on a sufficiently complex system. Also, let's not even start talking about hardware, where the temperamental stuff pretty much just develops a personality. If you've ever been responsible for a bunch of server hardware and you've not sworn, then you're probably Mother Teresa.

Don't get me wrong, context is important. If I'm on the phone to a customer, or otherwise representing my employer, I tone it down just a little. Most of the time you're interacting with outsiders you don't want to use colourful metaphors anyway - the stereotype of the self-important computer geek speaking in tongues and looking down on the mundanes isn't useful and the best way to combat it is to use direct language, not flowery profane metaphors.

(And if, when you're swearing, anything you say is literal truth and not a metaphor, then you're definitely being really unprofessional and will likely be risking criminal prosecution.)

I do awesome work.

I work for an awesome startup called PickLive, where I do cool things with Ruby, Rails, and a bunch of other cool buzzword technologies.

But I've always an interest in cool side projects. I've commercial Ruby development experience, I've experience supporting scores of servers deployed to remote locations, I've been making JavaScript-powered mobile webapps for fun, I've worked with most versions of VMWare and spent a ton of time with Xen.

Look, I'm boring you, why don't you just look at my CV?

git clone git://github.com/johnd/cv.git
cd cv
bundle install
rake CV:all

Okay, that's a really cheesy gimmick, but it's better than doing FizzBuzz to prove I'm not entirely useless, right? There's other stuff lurking on my GitHub profile, although the bulk of the software development work I've done isn't there.

I've been using Linux since 1999 and I've been managing my server hardware for fun and profit since 2005. I've got my hands dirty making and fixing most of the internet services you'd expect a sysadmin to know about. I can tell you why running your DNS with a MySQL back-end is a bad idea, but almost certainly not without swearing.

I've spent the entirety of my adult life living on the internet, from being 16 on mailing lists in 1996, to playing MUDs based on science fiction TV in 1998, to joining one of the earliest of what would become social networks in 2000, to meeting and marrying my wife in 2003. I have strong opinions on internet communities and this stuff is deeply important to me. I have conversations with my wife entirely in lolcat. Do you make internets? I'd love to work with you.