Christian Schlack

After many years of web development using PHP I discovered Ruby and instantly fell in love. My first steps where small scripts for database migrations and soon I used ruby for prototyping web applications (e.g. sprinthup.io). For a while I worked on some bigger Rails applications and finally I designed the architecture behind a cloud-backup-service (backhub.co) in ruby. I'm very concerned with performance and - although Ruby is often mentioned as "Ruby on Rails" - I often use Ruby without Rails. I'm familiar with many small web framework written in Ruby, eg. Sinatra.

With entering the Ruby world I also entered the Test-Driven-Development World and I never looked back. Writing tests first is the new default and nothing beats "green bar feeling"! I really enjoy talking gherkin with customers and stakeholders and I celebrate when I see feature requests ans bug reports written in gherkin language.

Part of almost any web-related project is a database. I've worked with different databases in different environments. My starting point for a prototype often ist SQLite. Getting more serious I usually switch to MySQL/MariaDB or Postgres. I've also dabbled with NoSQL types of databases (eg. MongoDB). My strength though is converting data into the best format: data export & import, data conversion, normalization as well as database backups, and restoring data.

I migrated a complete web-application from bare-metal servers to Amazon AWS. I have experience with all required services for securely running web-based applications. I'm a big fan of infrastructure as code: so far I build all AWS services using terraform.

I'm a certified Professional Scrum Master (PSM I). I live an breathe Scrum when working with agile teams. Many times I was Development Team member, on two occasions I served as Scrum Master and I coached Product Owners preparing user stories.

I've learnt C many years ago as part of my education, but I never created any production code in C. While programming in Ruby I noticed an abundance of C extension for Ruby. I started fixing or extending C extensions for my needs and then started working on an own C extension for performance critical code.