Entrepreneur. CEO and Founder of Epsilon Eight, software engineer, early Recurly employee, passionate about business.
Interim CTO for PivotPlanet and TheBestNotary, Technical Lead for Menuish and DockLister, Engineering Manager for Recurly
Cofounder of Menuish, restaurant menu management application, raised $50k through local incubator. Founder of DockLister, an MLS site for boats. Founder of Epsilon Eight, technical consulting company.
There a lot of resources out there for improving your Ruby or Javascript skills. http://www.codecademy.com/learn has some great content. https://peepcode.com/ is great as well.
Run through every tutorial you can find, improve upon the code in some way, then write your own blog post about it.
If you're really wanting to jump into some real-world code, checkout some node.js and ruby projects on GitHub and start contributing. This can be as simple as fixing/updating documentation or filing bugs. Improving tests is a great place to start.
Worked in and around SaaS businesses for the last 10 years.
This is a careful dance. Obviously you want the product of high enough quality that it has utility for your users, but you could play that game in perpetuity. If you have customers using the product and getting value from it, release it and start charging. Paying customers often behave different than free users and will give you the real feedback you need. Maybe there are features your paying customers need that your free customers haven't surfaced.
Chris mentored me from the first day I walked in to the office. I came in as an inexperienced intern and nine months later I left at the top of my game with more projects under my belt than I could count. Without his guidance I doubt I would be where I am today. He's an excellent developer, thinker, problem solver and teammate. We built many projects from scratch, and on more than one occasion we inherited messy projects and worked together to turn them into valuable company assets. I am only one of many people who benefited from working with him, and I hope to have the privilege to do so again soon. Chris is not just a great developer, he is a true professional.
Chris and I worked together for over a year at StepChange / Dachis Group. In that time, I came to rely on his solid development and operational skills as well as his intuitive insights, both in business and personal areas. He is an incredibly fast learner, is always up to date with the latest tech, and is extremely pleasant and fun person to work with. I would feel remiss working on projects without him involved. Highly recommended to anyone looking to succeed.
Chris was a great part of the team, able to fill in where needed -- including QA, researching API documentation, and writing code. He was always eager to learn from the team's experience, but also willing to explore unknown territory (developing around a new Facebook feature, for example).
In short, he's bright, works well on a team, and was more valuable to us than his experience on paper would lead one to believe.
