About me

I’m Andreas Neuhaus, a software developer located in Dortmund, Germany and this is my personal blog about software development. I got a degree in computer science in 2006 at the university of applied sciences in Dortmund. Since then, I’m working as a freelancer on iOS and Ruby projects. If you’re looking for a freelance developer to hire for a project or to help on your team, feel free to contact me.

The content of this blog will mainly cover topics that are in my area of focus during my development work, which is:

Ruby (and Rails)

Since I found out about Ruby in 2005, I became a fan of the Ruby language and its charming way of doing OO like I always wanted it to be. Finally after 12 years of doing development in C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP and Python, I came across Ruby and was quickly convinced. Since then, I’ve been using Ruby from writing smaller helper scripts up to implementing larger sites (e.g. with frameworks like Rails or Sinatra). Some of my contributions were merged back into the Rails core.
I usually feel at home most when working on backend logic, e.g. using databases with Mongoid (for MongoDB) or ActiveRecord (for MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite) to run a site or to provide HTTP REST webservices. I’m also used to work with other webservices like the Facebook Open Graph API, the Twitter API, OAuth, OpenID and such.
Luckily, almost everything in the Ruby world encourages agile and test-driven development, so using distributed code versioning like with Git and unit testing like with RSpec is quite natural.
At the frontend side, I like to use HTML 5 and CSS 3 enriched with JavaScript (jQuery usually). Extensive use of JavaScript also led me to Node.js and its event driven, non-blocking advantages on the server side.

iOS

After learning Objective C and Cocoa Touch the year before, I started to develop iPhone apps in 2009 and iPad apps later as well. Besides the challenge of writing performant and energy-optimized code for mobile devices, it’s great to use the various frameworks that come with iOS. So I often ended up connecting an iOS app to a Rails backend server, e.g. to provide In App Purchase verification or asynchronous Remote (Push-) Notifications.

Linux

Back those days at the university, I used Linux a lot and got experienced with administrating Linux servers as well as developing system-related code like device drivers. I initiated the first open source Wavelan IEEE driver for Linux, named wvlan_cs. In the meantime, it has been replaced by newer drivers and there are just traces of my name left in the current Linux kernel. I mainly focused on networking, IPv6, VPNs, X.509, later also KVM virtualization, administration of servers and created some smaller tools. This isn’t my primary area of activity now, though these insights are useful today to write performant code. And I still run my own dedicated server for fun.

Contact

You can contact me via email by writing to info at this domain.