At RailsConf we had an opportunity to interview Jeremy Friesen from Scientist.com, where we talked about his work as a consultant on the software services team, his experience working with Rails since 2005, and the importance of community and open-source projects.
Jeremy is a consultant at Scientist.com, which is a marketplace for research and development services. Jeremy works with clients in the research and development space providing full IT support and developing digital artifacts and complicated metadata.
Jeremy has been working with Rails since December 2005, and he has been attending Rails conferences since 2009. He loves the active support idioms in Rails and the expressiveness of the activerecord DSL. He thinks that the Rails community could be more opinionated about how to organize domains within apps.
Jeremy works in a "majestic monolith," which is a large application comprising numerous Rails engines. He thinks that understanding the maintenance side of the equation is crucial when working on such an app. Jeremy is exploring Lisp, an esoteric language that is similar to Ruby in some ways. He believes that old and boring technologies like SQL have proven their viability over time, and it's essential to consider the human and maintenance costs of using emerging tech.
During the interview, we also talked about the importance of maintaining a long-term perspective in tech, with Jeremy advocating for maintaining and fixing existing systems instead of constantly chasing something new. He also highlighted the importance of having a human-centric approach to coding, noting that it's always a trade-off between mathematical precision and simplicity.
Finally, Jeremy gave a shoutout to the open-source project Samvera.org, a consortium of academic research libraries and cultural heritage institutions that he works on. They have been using Rails for 13 to 14 years. He also recognized the important role that community plays in open-source projects and the impact it has had on his own work. Jeremy acknowledges the people who have made a tremendous impact on him and helped him think about software, community, and constraints in a positive way. He is also on the board for nonprofits like Samvera.org and advocates for the principles of Open Source, which is something he holds near and dear.
Overall, it was a fantastic conversation that touched on a wide range of topics, from the importance of community in tech to the benefits of exploring different languages and technologies. Thanks again to Jeremy for taking the time to speak with us!
