About Me
Who Are You?
My name is Akshay, and I'm a software developer living in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia. I grew up in India, but Canada has been my home for the past 9 years.
I love programming in Ruby and building web applications with Rails. This blog is my attempt to share my learnings and to spread the joy of programming in Ruby with the world. Every day, I try to learn something new in Ruby and Rails and write about it.
If you're not a programmer and don't know what or who Ruby is, it's a programming language from Japan that runs many of the web applications that you know and love. Think Shopify, GitHub, Basecamp, AirBnb, Twitch, Dribbble, SoundCloud, Intercom, etc...the list is endless. Rails is a framework that makes it very easy and enjoyable to build these web applications.
Why Do You Blog?
This blog exists purely for selfish reasons. I find the field of software development endlessly fascinating and wanted to track everything I learned about building software over time.
I also found that the best way for me to learn a topic was to research how it works, write a blog post that teaches that topic in simple words, and then put it on the Internet to reference when needed in the future. If others find these posts helpful, relevant, or interesting, that's just the icing on the cake.
This blog is a labor of love. Programming and writing are two activities that really make me happy, and this blog lets me do them both. I started the blog in late 2021 (right after I started learning Rails), and now more than 20,000 Ruby and Rails programmers read it each month. The new developer friends and connections I've made all over the world is a fantastic reward in and of itself.
What Do You Do?
I work remotely for Toronto-based Cambridge Brain Sciences, working on cognitive function assessment software that is used by healthcare practitioners and researchers around the world. At CBS, I get to work with and learn from some of the best Rails programmers.
I have more than seven years of professional experience as a full-stack web application developer, and have worked on all layers of the web stack, including the back-end, front-end, and database. For a long time, I was a .NET developer, programming C# on Windows. However, in early 2021, I started learning Ruby and Rails for one of my side projects.
After working on enterprise applications with C# and .NET for the past six years, programming with Ruby was a breath of fresh air. Within a week, I was in love with this beautiful programming language. After immersing myself in Ruby and Rails for a few months, I decided to switch from C#/.NET to Ruby and Rails.
As a software developer, my primary goal is to build useful software that solves problems and provides value to the users, and I approach all my projects with the same mindset. I am very passionate about software development, always looking forward to learning new skills to become a better software developer.
If you think I can add value to your team or organization, please drop me an email. I look forward to talking to you.
Thanks for stopping by.
Akshay