Interview with a Ruby developer Mikhail Nikalyukin

We continue to meet you with members of our growing team. Today Mikhail Nikalyukin, Ruby Developer from Sevastopol branch, has answered our questions.

How have you decided to be a developer?

Actually, I have never dreamed of being a developer. At university, where I studied, we had one inspirational teacher, who suggested me to try writing some code and I enjoyed the process so much. My mind was blown up and I decided to proceed with it. First language was Delphi, then C++, C#. After that I moved to PHP (my teacher asked me to build document management system for the university). Later I tried MVC pattern with the ASP.NET, I didn’t feel like it was my kind of thing. The language was heavy and I was forced to type a lot of unnecessary code. At the same time, I decided to join Ruby meetups in Sevastopol and got my hands on Ruby. Ever since I’m in love with Ruby. Currently, I’m also looking towards Objective C and iOS.

How the process of changing language was held?

Switching the language isn’t a hard process. I believe that you should learn how to program more, that way changing the language is only about changing your instrument, that’s it.

What changes are happening with Ruby right now? What directions of development are on the wave?

There are several new modern robust languages. Experienced RoR developers nowadays started to look into them, most popular are Erlang, Go and Clojure. Ruby has his bright future, I believe. There are a lot of open-source libraries and they are continually developing, also the community is top notch.

What about other frameworks except for Rails?

You can use Sinatra, it’s a light-weight framework, that frequently used for the small or static websites.
Also there is Padrino, which built on top of Sinatra, it has some extra-features, but still not as big as Rails.

Could you please share a general idea of your current project, what is not covered by NDA?

The project is for big manufacture company which produces projectors and other hi-tech products. They are in a need of web view for telecommunication stack and low-code programming of devices itself. The project is fun and differs from the others because we have an ability to write some low-code with Lua.