Ruby on Rails Developer Erwin Seribo is a code warrior. With a love for programming that started in college, he has been actively joining national hackathon competitions. He joined the Cloud Employee team in March of 2016, and exclusively worked for a digital market research firm. There he was responsible for developing new features, bug fixing, project improvement and maintenance, while collaborating with a small team of developers. We're putting the spotlight on him for this month's developer feature.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I am a passionate software developer who loves programming especially in Ruby. I have 5 years of experience in the IT industry as a web / software developer particularly in the Ruby on Rails framework. I am confident that I have enough knowledge and skills to be part of a great team and I am willing to learn and grow more when I am in a team.

Collaboration is one of my way to achieve the expected output and deliver it on time or earlier. During my free time I join Ruby meetups, hackathons, and code camps outside of work as part of my growth and career learning. I am a team player and a proactive developer who suggests and adapts new strategies or new technologies from co-developers or from technical meetups or seminars that can help boost the development of the project. A the same time I apply the suggested best practices in current trends like TDD, Agile, git-flow, DevOps, scrum, pair programming, open source, and collaboration.

In the 5 years of my career I learned how software development works from planning to implementation and testing until deployment, support, new feature addition, and bug fixing phase. I am eager to learn new technologies and strategies for me to grow more and be one of the best developers or even the next CTO in the future who will guide the development team.

When and how did you get started programming?

I started loving programming when I was in college. I joined a programming competition and became the champion of that contest. In a web development and animation competition I won 1st place. During my last year in college I became the leader of my thesis team, the one who mainly developed our web application software project which showed me that this is what I want to do in my career.

Since then I started pursuing my career as a software developer in the IT industry. I tried my luck in the BPO industry. However, during the job application I found that the right job for me is to become a developer. All the questions during my application as to what I am good at were pointing to a software developer career. So I pursued that, beginning with a startup company as a web developer in the backend. Right now I want to level up my career by becoming a team lead.

What is the programming language and/or framework of your choice? And why?

As of now the main language I want to work with is Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework. But I want to explore the Elixir language and Phoenix framework as well, since I found out that Elixir is 10x faster than Ruby which got me interested on it. If there’s an opportunity to sharpen my skills on Elixir I will use that opportunity to learn it, but if there’s none I will just continue my career as a Ruby developer since I am still happy working with it. I do Java and Android development too, but it’s my second priority language since I am not that much fun on mobile development.

Can you share some of the projects you’ve done? Which of them are you most proud of and why?

The project that I am proud of as of the moment is the AFriendAbroad web application which has some real-time messaging and notification, video chat, scheduling appointment, and online payment. The other one is the project I worked on in my previous company Oberthur. It’s a telecom application wherein the app manages the provisioning and settings of a SIM card. The other one is a GPS tracking project where we track vehicle activity.

In your work experience as a developer, what are the skills that proved surprisingly useful?

The skills that proved surprisingly useful are my Ruby skills, front end skills, Java skills, web skills, knowledge on managing a team, being proactive, hardworking and being determined in work.

What projects/technologies do you enjoy working on in your spare time?

As of now I’m not doing any project in my spare time. But I’m learning and reading new strategies and technical stuff especially on Ruby, Elixir, front end, and mobile technology. I attend meetups and code camp as well to learn new things from the event or from the other developers out there.

Walk us through your day. What’s a typical day like for you as a developer?

A typical day as a developer: I wake up, come to work, attend a standup meet, debug, read documentation, think and plan strategy, code, write unit test / functional test / integration test, commit code, deploy to staging, report, go home and get social.

What’s your favorite part of being a developer?

My favorite part of being a developer is that I never stop learning and achieving the impossible, especially the process of turning an abstract idea into a concrete application.

Tech is an industry where the trends and requirements change quickly. How do you keep your skills up to date?

I keep my skills up to date by attending seminars, meetups, code camp, socialising with developers, and reading documentation and news about the new technologies and strategy regarding software development.

What made you decide to work at Cloud Employee?

Great opportunity and open environment.

What’s it like working in Cloud Employee so far?

On my first days, things were low-key and a bit chaotic, but now a bit relaxed with people pumped for work since we now have some amazing ice breaker activities.

What do you like to do in your spare time, outside of programming?

Playing video games, watching movies, going out with friends, visiting my family at my home town and some me time.

Any tv shows you’d like to recommend?

If IT related so far none since most of I watch is on O’Reilly Safari website or Rails Cast for learning specific strategy or technology.

What would be your dream dev setup, in terms of hardware and software? / What do you use to get the job done?  

In terms of hardware, I am more comfortable working on a Macbook Pro because it’s fast and reliable to work with. For communication I use Slack and Skype. For development, I prefer to use iTerm, vim, tmux, Sublime, Git, Vagrant, MacDown, pgAdmin, Sequel Pro, MiniMagick, Docker, Chrome, PSequel, and tmate.

Need a quality Ruby on Rails developer for your development team? Erwin is available for hire. Talk to us, learn more how Cloud Employee works, or see our Developer Pricing Guide. You can hire dedicated offshore developers with us across many technologies.