Hi! My name’s Kevin. I’m an autodidact software developer, speaker and blogger. I’m the CTO with the talented team at Resource Guru where we build the best team scheduling tool on the web 🤩. I’ve been working remotely full time since 2016. I live in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, having previously worked as a Lead Ruby and JavaScript developer at Platform45 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I love building with Ruby, Go and TypeScript.

Ruby has been my programming language of choice since 2011. It’s beautifully expressive, and gives the programmer powerful tools to craft a codebase that is an aesthetic masterpiece, far moreso than other, more rigid languages. Rails 8 is a modern marvel of a web framework, and I would still use it before reaching for the flavour of the month tools. When Ruby isn’t appropriate, such as when CPU bound performance is a critical consideration, I prefer to reach for Go.

I’ve been shipping Go code since 2015. The Go standard library is well thought out, stable and fully featured. And although Go is very verbose compared to the aesthetic sensibilities of Ruby, I enjoy working with the language, I like the toolset, and I find my Go code generally does what I want it to do on the first run.

I use Neovim and Cursor to fulfil my text editing needs. A scriptable text editor helps to improve my productivity by filing away repeated actions behind convenient key bindings, allowing me to focus more on code and less on my keyboard and mouse.

I’ve been writing software for as long as I can remember, first on a Commodore 64 and QBASIC on DOS, followed by Pascal, Delphi, C and PHP during my school years. My professional career began in the .NET sphere, writing C# with .NET 3.5 and 4.0, as well as working on data intensive OLTP and OLAP systems using Microsoft’s SQL Server and Analysis Services. Since then I’ve spent countless hours honing my skills on the journey to mastering the art of software development.

I believe a good craftsman should be willing to teach and mentor others. I regularly attend and speak at usergroup events and conferences. I was a regular panelist on the ZADevChat podcast from 2015-2017 with Kenneth Kalmer and Len Weincier.