I'm Alan from Singapore currently reading Mechanical Engineering at the National University of Singapore. Despite majoring in mechanical engineering, I'm really passionate about software engineering and is planning to make that my career.
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Winter Break 2014: I built RubyBench.org after reading Sam Saffon's call for a long running Ruby benchmark. The project had been started but no one had the time to see it to completion due to their full time commitments. Therefore, I decided to spend my winter break to get it to a publishable state.
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Summer Break 2014: I worked on "Unifying Controller and Integration Tests in Rails" as part of Google Summer of Code 2014. More about the project here.
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August 2013 - July 2014: I was a full time software engineering intern at LoveWithFood.com. During my stint there, I picked up Ruby and Ruby on Rails without any prior programming experience.
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I've also been contributing to Ruby on Rails: http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/contributors/guo-xiang-tan/commits
I wrote a blog post about Nitrous.IO after I attended a SG Founders meetup in Mountain View which Nitrous.IO hosted. I was very new to programming then and I can still recall how difficult it was to set up my environment correctly. On days when I don't bring my laptop to school, I can work on my projects easily by spinning up a box on Nitrous.IO. I believe that the product can really change the way developers work and I want to aid the effort.
Honestly, there are a ton of things that I still don't know and I want to change that. The biggest draw to Nitrous.IO for me was the following statement on your jobs page: "We value people who are doers instead of talkers". RubyBench.org is my answer to that statement. I like software engineering because I can build things for people to use (NUS Mechanical Engineering provides very little of that which is the reason why I'm going a different path). I really believe that working at Nitrous.IO will propel me forward as a developer and I'm excited about the challenges ahead.