Simon.Fish

Engineering and educating for a free and open web.

Ruby logo Ruby on Ruby on Rails logo Rails developer with four years of industry experience.
Experienced with Turbo logo Hotwire, ViewComponent logo ViewComponent, and more.

Simon is an extremely fast learner and a creative thinker, who has become a highly effective part of our dev team.
--Ben Saunders, Lead Software Engineer, UKCloud Ltd.

Their genuine passion to help both the local and global tech community, mixed in with their impressive technical knowledge and skills, has made it a pleasure to work with them.
--Pauline Narvas, Code First Girls course ambassador

They will be a powerful addition to any development team.
--Audrea Cook, Software Engineer, Raise.dev

Simon has an ability to take a complex task [...] and not only turn it around extremely quickly, but also to apply a level of thought and ingenuity of someone a number of years more experienced.
--Andy Sykes, Formerly of Pera Technology

My Work

ViewComponent

Open Source
31 Mar 2021-> I am a maintainer for a promising Rails frontend library from GitHub.

Raise.dev

Industry Experience
30 Jun 2020-31 Mar 2022 I led architecture and development of an online coaching platform at a startup.

Remote Record

Open Source
22 Oct 2020-> I built a Ruby gem to model remote resources as domain objects in your app.

nvar

Open Source
24 Sep 2020-> I built a Ruby gem to ease managing environment variables in Ruby apps.

UKCloud

Industry Experience
02 Jul 2018-16 Aug 2019 I was part of a Scrum development team at a major UK cloud hosting provider, working across Ruby on Rails, Keycloak, and more.

Hi, I'm Simon.

I'm a software engineer with four years of industry experience and a Computer Science degree. I'm with FreeAgent as a Senior Engineer in the Core Services team.

I'm motivated to:

  • support free and open source software like Rails, ViewComponent, and my own libraries
  • learn new things, and use those findings to teach and empower others
  • make a positive difference to the world through technology
  • work with companies that will help me achieve those goals

I'm on the committer team for ViewComponent, and I've used Hotwire (Turbo and Stimulus) extensively. I've got a diverse array of experience and a love for the Ruby on Rails ecosystem. My experience thus far has given me informed opinions about Rails and how it's used.

I'm a fast learner with an open mind, so I'm ready to learn new tools and ways of working. I've got a reputation for efficiency, which I'll always be careful to balance with thoroughness.

Blog

Checkpoint

Capturing where I'm at in my career as of October 2023.

Subject to Change: Effective Use of RSpec

I talk about how to use the `subject` helper and other RSpec goodies to improve your tests.

Static Site Building with Rails

Rails isn't built for serving static HTML, but why let that stop you?

Open Source - The Long Road

Contributing to open source takes time and experience to get right. Here's my journey.

So, How's Remote Work Working Out?

Unsure about the world of remote work? Here's my early experience with it.

Welcome, New Gatsby!

Let's dive into the history of my personal website. It's been quite the journey!