It’s been more than a year since the last I published something here. Well, time really flies by when you’re having fun.
I still receive emails and see comments popping up, so Devblast is far from dead.. I just haven’t had the time to be more active on it, and in this post, I want to share why. I do believe everything I wrote has still value even if it’s a bit outdated, and I will be working on refreshing things.
Let’s dive in!
2016
2016 was the year I quit my job to focus on my side business, Devblast (Samurails at the time). I took 3 months to write Master Ruby Web APIs before the summer, then took 2 months off to spend time in France with my family and friends.
When I got back to Thailand, I turned Samurails into Devblast, but switching away from Wordpress and building a custom Elixir web application. This was my first experience with Elixir, but has played a major role in where I am today (building up suspense is good I heard ;)).
This all led to the month of December, 2016. I was going back to France for Christmas, but right before that, I got approached on Upwork for some consulting work. At the same time, a friend of mine asked me if I could spend some time improving her web application. I said yes to both, and my career as a freelancer/consultant started.
My original plan was to freelance part-time, and use the rest of my time to work on new books and web applications. All the freelance work I did at that time was still in Ruby.
2017
The first 6 months of 2017 are very blurry. I did not spend time on Devblast at all.. instead I enjoyed short work days/weeks doing freelancing and earning more than ever before. I had a lot of free time, that I efficiently used to workout, rock climb and party with friends.
Everything changed in July though. One of my friend here in Bangkok was sharing stuff about cryptocurrencies. I had started getting back into it (bought some Bitcoins back in 2015) recently, and grabbed some ETH.
So I got in touch with him. Long story short, he was (still is) the CTO of Omise, a payment processing company, which was about to launch OmiseGO and do an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) for the OMG token.
After meeting with him and the other brains behind OmiseGO, I received a job offer to join OmiseGO as “eWallet Team Lead”. The eWallet application OmiseGO wanted to build is a Web 2.5 application connecting the current web with blockchain technology, in order to make it easier for small and big companies to make the switch without feeling overwhelmed.
I officially started working there on September 1st, when OmiseGO only had like 5 people (We’re around 30+ I think now). The eWallet team itself has grown to 7 people (and we’re still looking for a backend developer!).
2018
It has been a lot of fun working there for the past 10 months! We’ve just released version 1.0.0.pre0 of the eWallet and we’re looking forward to the next step: adding support for blockchain transactions!
If you check the repo (it’s open source), you will see that we’ve written the eWallet in Elixir. My liking of Elixir started when I rebuilt Devblast and hasn’t stopped since. It’s an elegant, fast and smart language and I don’t really see myself going back to Ruby anytime soon. I still write some Ruby, however, since the eWallet comes with a Ruby server SDK.
So what happens next fort Devblast? Well, I’m going to try to go back to a writing schedule. The thing is I’m super busy with OmiseGO so I don’t want to make any promises. I might only publish blog posts once in a while if I have something worth to share.
What I’m going to do, however, is update Modular Rails to work with Rails 5 and re-release it! This will be different from my previous releases: an online version of the book will be available for free, for everyone to read and learn :) I will still sell offline formats (PDF, ePub, Mobi) of the book, but the actual knowledge will be available for free.
I guess that’s it for this update. I didn’t go into details too much, but if you have any questions, I’d be happy to clarify some parts of the story :)
PS: I’m currently looking for backend and front-end developers, as well as devops to join the eWallet SDK team!
