Douglas F Shearer

A Brief Introduction

Hello there. I'm a software developer who specialises in Ruby on Rails. I am based in Scotland and am currently available for hire for long or short term contracts both remotely (Worldwide) and locally (Scotland). I have three years experience of working with Rails and I hold a degree in computer science. In the past I've worked with Java and PHP, and I love exploring new languages and technologies.

In my spare time I race mountainbike cross-country.

Previous Work

Here are some sites I've worked on over the past two years.

truelobby.com

TrueLobby

A site for discourse between elected officials and voters. Powered by Ruby on Rails.
zoecity.com

ZoeCity

A community social network with rich media features. Powered by Ruby on Rails.
attwilliams.com

AT&T Williams Racing

An interactive flash frontend powered by a Ruby on Rails backend.

What People Say

Quotes taken from my LinkedIn profile. Recommendations can also be seen on my Working with Rails profile.

“Douglas is a very good software engineer. He is extremely knowledgeable and shows technical and business maturity rivaling that of much more senior and experienced developers. Douglas has impeccable work ethics and always put his best in the task at hand. You absolutely cannot go wrong with Douglas. Run, don't walk to hire Douglas.”

- Colin Wong, CEO ZoeCity Inc. November 28, 2008.
“Douglas is a delightful person. He has a good insight into what needs to be done in almost any circumstance, his Ruby skills are excellent, and he can be depended on to handle several disparate duties at the same time. Also, ask him about his bikes. ;)”

- Michael Christenson II, Senior Project Lead, Futurecorp of London. June 15, 2007.

Open Source

Here are some projects I've released into the wild. More can be found at my Github page.

Rails Plugin

Acts as Indexed

A pain-free way to add fulltext search to a Ruby on Rails app.
Rubygem

Base58

A library for converting ints to and from base58. Handy for Flickr short urls.
Javascript Bookmarklet

Github Bookmarklet

Make searching Github only one click away in your browser.