KRIS LEECH
Web Developer
I am a freelance website developer based in the Midlands.
- Highly Skilled at development of websites and software
- Comforable with server setup & maintence
- Pretty good with semantic HTML and CSS
- A dab hand at adding AJAX and Javascript functionality
Many years of working alongside people on a diverse range of projects has lead to new learning experiences and the chance to continually evaluate my own performance.
I find developing software highly rewarding and and by necessity this has also lead to involvement in System Administration, Finance and Team Management.
Fundamentally I see transparency and open channels of communication as key to delivering a project which is successful for all those involved.
Today I predominantly work on web based projects, favoring secure and robust open source products such as RubyOnRails, Git, Apache, MySQL and Linux. I find these to be the 'best of breed' tools and their use highly enjoyable.
As well as freelancing I work for development company, Interkonect Limited who is based in Nottingham and has been trading since 2002.
Teaching & Training
As a result of RubyOnRails workshops I held in Nottingham I was asked to write and present the 5-day RubyOnRails Web Development Course for Impartica IT Training which runs in London.
Read an interview with myself over at the Impartica IT Trainers blog.
I develop using the popular RubyOnRails framework which consists of conventions which allow programmers to quickly understand each others work. The code is seperated from the HTML templates allowing programmers and designers to work on the same project without steping on each others toes.
RubyOnRails has a very strong plugin ecosystem which means common site elements such as login, file upload and thumbnail creation are already written and can just be installed and configured. This allows me to be super productive and create a working prototype early on.
RubyOnRails has templates which allows Graphic Designers to work using their normal tools such as Dreamweaver, FTP and Photoshop. They simply enter 'tags' where dynamic data should appear. There is no restriction on the use of Javascript, CSS or Flash.
Coupled with online project management and version control RubyOnRails provides a great platform to develop any calibre of website from fancy web 2.0 sites to core business facilities for the enterprise.
Here are some sites developed using RubyOnRails: Twitter, Yellowpages, Scribd, MTV Style, Jobster and Soundcloud. You may have heard of some of them!
Contact me for examples of work, rates and other stuff!
| Phone | 0115 714 8888 | |
|---|---|---|
| Skype | kris.leech | |
| KrisLeech | ||
| KrisLeech | ||
| Github Open source projects | KrisLeech |
Here you will find a mixture of news, technical posts, tips and other things (hopefully) of intrest!
Sessions across subdomains in Rails 2.2.2
The correct format for setting the session domain in Rails 2.2.2
Install Rmagick on Ubuntu
The latest version, 2, of RMagick requires ImageMagick version 6.4.9 or greater. Unfortunently this version is not avalible via Aptitude - at least not on the version I am running, which is a few years old now. The solution, for my purposes, was to instal
Hiding code/html in Erb, no comments required
Commenting out large chunks of code in Erb templates is sometimes a bit tricky, time consuming and looks ugly, here is a simple way to do the same, no comments required.
Passenger, $PATH and the Prince
I've been playing with using PrinceXML to generate PDF's in my Rails applications. PrinceXML takes HTML/CSS as input so there is no need to create seperate HTML and PDF templates which the usual way with other libaries such as Prawn_to. The only do
Switch branches, reload environment
When switching branches make sure to restart the application server to ensure that the environment is reloaded. Branches may have different gem dependencies and configurations which can lead to frustration. git checkout feature_65 rake test:integration