Jamie Schembri

Ruby / Rails Specialist

I’m a seasoned software engineer, bringing to the table more than a decade of deep experience with Ruby on Rails. My focus is on shipping useful and worthwhile software. I can lead your team to launch or fix up your legacy app, with a razor-sharp focus on generating value. I’ll ask the stupid questions that need to be asked and work closely with you to ensure time is spent delivering what your customers need, without the fluff they don’t.

Recent Experience

2024– Menuez International, B.V., Remote (IJsselstein, The Netherlands)

Brought on to help a small team in a successful media/printing scale-up. Primary tasks include:

  • Developing new API connectivity with external printers;
  • Building deep integration with a new, third-party document editor;
  • Modernizing and upgrading the code-base and libraries;
  • Guiding deployment strategies with Docker and Kamal;
  • Abstracting heavy use of conditional code across different tenants with design patterns.
2022–2024 Nedap Healthcare, Remote (Groenlo, The Netherlands)

Part of a small team tasked with sustaining and rejuvenating a set of legacy Ruby libraries used across a large number of independent (micro-)services, melding them into a cohesive framework as part of the new application platform, whilst providing support and upgrade paths for other teams.

  • Designed and led implementation of the new application framework following discussions with relevant stakeholders to extract requirements.
  • Maintained a number of internal dependencies which together made up the legacy Ruby / Rails application platform;
  • Discovered and plugged demonstrably catastrophic security vulnerability.
  • Implemented reusable, shared CI/CD components, resulting in greater consistency and a more “plug-and-play” developer experience across teams;
  • Rapidly built a Slack bot to summarise threads via OpenAI on events; said bot was also used to make on-call scheduling information visible.
  • Designed and implemented JSON schema validation for custom framework configuration, together with CI pipeline validation workflow.
  • Automated dependency monitoring with SBOMs, providing actionable insights over hundreds of projects.
  • Assembled a rudimentary low-code platform for automating common tasks with Ruby and GitHub CI.
2021–2022 Initforthe, Remote (London, United Kingdom)

Engineering full-stack apps for SMBs with Ruby on Rails 7.2 and Hotwire; working very closely with clients to extract requirements and implement high ROI features.

  • Used PostGIS, Google Maps and JavaScript with Stimulus to build highly interactive maps used for GPS queries;
  • Optimised slow and unreliable CI/CD pipelines, using parallelism to decrease test run-time by up to 95%, and leading to substantial productivity gains and lower time to delivery across the team;
  • Took over administration of several EOL Windows Server machines, writing Powershell scripts for legacy data consumption and synchronization over APIs.
2021 PDM Automotive, Remote (United States)

Ruby developer on a leading VC-funded, data-heavy app in the automotive space.

  • Sustained a complex legacy Sinatra/Padrino application;
  • Updated a niche Shopify app with Elasticsearch and React;
  • Kicked off investigation into, and advised on, the separation of an overgrown monolith into a microservices architecture.
2019 OnTheGoSystems, Remote (International)

Worked on WPML, one of the largest premium WordPress plugins. Primary focus was on the Rails backend and communication with other services in the SOA.

2018–2019 Plug in Useful, Remote (Copenhagen, Denmark)

Built and maintained SaaS applications in Ruby on Rails & React for the Shopify e-commerce platform.

  • Spearheaded workflow improvements, DevOps, and communication, resulting in quicker feature delivery and a sense of teamwork;
  • Took ownership of code and infrastructure following a restructure, whilst keeping systems running and customers happy;
  • Worked closely with sales and customer service to prioritise and resolve concrete, customer-facing issues.
2014–2018 & 2020 Lico Innovations, Hybrid (Mierlo, The Netherlands)

Architected web applications of various sizes under demanding time constraints.

  • Developed a large enterprise SaaS application for global corporations in the catering industry, pivoting for survival early in the COVID-19 pandemic;
  • Leveraged Artificial Intelligence to generate rich metadata for a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool used by film festivals, agencies, and educational institutions;
  • Implemented custom in-house tooling with Elixir to increase engineer productivity and reduce friction around a new, Docker-based development environment.

Other Projects

Wordvine (wordvine.app)

A language-learning tool I built to improve my Dutch skills. Currently in the MVP phase, in that it works well enough for learning Dutch vocabulary from English.

The biggest challenge was engineering LLM prompts for meaningful content generation. This was then seeded into the app as JSON.

Built with Ruby on Rails, Python, OpenAI, Hotwire, Docker, GitHub (code + container registry) and deployed with Kamal.

Enummer (github.com/shkm/enummer)

An open-source Ruby gem I built to scratch an itch. Augments Rails with ergonomic, multi-value enum fields via bitwise operations.

The meta-programming required to tack this onto ActiveRecord was the most challenging, which also proves it a little tricky to maintain.

Education

2009–2013 Diploma in Computing at The Open University, Hybrid (Milton Keynes, United Kingdom)

BSc course involving object-oriented programming (Java, JavaScript), artificial intelligence, project management, HCI, set theory, and concurrency models.