Hi, I'm Jonas Galvez, a software engineer, internet enthusiast and entrepreneur based in Brazil. I thrive on subtraction and minimalism.
It's incredibly hard to deal with today's information overload. These days I try to focus on a few key areas of interest and try to make the best of it.
As an engineer, I have amassed significant experience doing both frontend and backend development. I have done Flash and ActionScript, Ruby, Python, infrastructure and architecture planning and operations design for big web applications and lately, I have also beeng doing a lot of frontend coding with the best of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.
Having said that, my key areas of interest are:
The one essential rule for getting things done is the simple habit of comitting to doing one thing at a time. For someone who has new ideas every single day, it's a pretty hard habit to build yet one that pays off. My main projects currently are:
Blogrolls are so last decade, but I still find it necessary, even for my own record keeping, to list the authors I read. Some of them really helped me shape myself as a human being and professional.
Paul Graham, Claus Wahlers, Michael Barrish, Paul Ford, Mark Pilgrim, Maciej Ceglowski, Hugh MacLeod, Joe Gregorio, Simon Willison, Mark Nottingham, Tim Bray, Jeremy Zawodny, Ryan Tomayko, Ze Frank, Roberto de Almeida, Ronaldo Ferraz, Fabricio Zuardi, John Gruber, Andy Baio, Sam Ruby, Ben Hammersley, Ned Batchelder, Chris Wanstrath, Leonard Lin, Joi Ito, Aaron Swartz, Yehuda Katz, Evan Weaver, Evan Miller, Rafe Colburn, Jamie Zawinski, Jessica Hagy, Jon Udell, Frank Chimero, Marco Arment, Doc Searls, Bruce Eckel, Peter-Paul Koch, Charles Miller, Stefan Tilkov, Baron Schwartz, Anne van Kesteren, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Dustin Sallings, James Tauber, Dave Shea, John Allspaw, Robin Debreuil, Armin Ronacher, Ben Adida, Ilya Grigorik, Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Kevin Fox, John Resig, Mathias Meyer, Paul Hammond, Evan Williams, Ian Bicking, Peter Michaux, Alex Payne, Arthur Debert, Bill de hÓra, Brad Choate, Eric Evans, Ian Hickson, Nick Kallen, Robert Hodges, Roy T. Fielding, Ryan Dahl, Werner Vogels, Salvatore Sanfilippo, David DeSandro and Ethan Herdrick.
I'm available for hire. I have 10 years of experience developing software, and my skills are rock solid, but they aren't as important as what I've learned and employed in my life about creativity, discipline and self-control. I'm a mature developer ready to fully commit to your project.
I'm operating as a freelance consultant and you can use the table below to see my availability for the next three months. You can only book me for at least a whole week. My weekly rate is US$1500. I'm of course open to long term oportunities so please get in touch if that might be the case.
Please send me an e-mail should you be interested in booking one or more weeks of consulting and development work. My work history and recent engagements are listed in LinkedIn and I can provide many references if you like.
Management and communication. I consider myself a great writer and communicator, and like it when I'm able to manage not only my own but other people's work as well in a lean and pragmatic manner. I'm a perfectionist, but also very goal oriented and focused on getting things done rather than getting things unrealistically perfect.
Backend development. I know my way around many Unix environments, SSH, I can set up and migrate code repositories in SVN, Git and Mercurial and generally clean up any kind of mess in a web server. I like writing deployment scripts, configuring monitoring daemons, remodelling databases and code for greater scalability, implementing worker queues and other backend trickery. My specialty is Python and I have a good deal fo experience using Tornado, Django and Flask. But I'm also a skilled Ruby developer and am currently devoting some time to learning Google's Go language, which everyone seems to agree is awesome.
Frontend development. I fully understand HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Having been a ActionScript developer, I came to understand and love JavaScript for all its confusing magic rather soon in my career. Things like this and prototype-based inheritance, var and all variable scoping nuances and the general wonkiness of JavaScript code in general, do not frigthen me. I find clean, minimalist HTML, CSS and JavaScript a joy to write and read. I tend to avoid full-blown frameworks like Rails and Django for my own projects. I tend to avoid CSS dialects, CoffeeScript and other higher layers of abstraction. Although I will fully embrace jQuery if it makes sense in a given project's budget and timeline, I tend to prefer writing native code as much as I can, especially when all modern browsers have JavaScript's latest and rather excellent new methods for manipulating DOM objects.
Pragmatic UI/UX design. I'm not a designer, but I do fully dominate the CSS boxing model and can diagram pretty much any layout in modern HTML5 and CSS3 code. I know my way around Photoshop and find no difficulty implementing PSDs as cleanly and efficiently styled markup (using sprites and whatnot). I once again reiterate I'm not a designer, but I like to think I have a good taste and am in fact able to design great barebones UI prototypes using the best of typography and usability principles.
Product design and copywriting. Having been involved more than once in the overall product development process of the companies I worked for, I have noticed over the past few years that I enjoy copywriting a lot. I have a very strong opinion on what a modern web application needs to offer, and like to be able to incorporate such opinions in product design.
I keep myself accountable. I stay online for 5 hours on weekdays and try and work offline for the rest of the day, employing a flexible work schedule. My online hours are from 14:00 to 19:00 BRT. I like writing e-mails. I like keeping people well informed. I like giving estimates that I know I will be able to commit to. I hate letting people down.
I keep myself healthy. I follow a strict dieting and exercise regimen that occupies my mornings. I sleep very well. I do intermittent fasting and go to the gym every morning. I don't eat junk food and I don't pull all nigthers unless they are absolutely required, which is when I usually take Modafinil for prolonged and heightened focus. I do not like having to using Modafinil though and prefer to follow saner work schedules that don't influence my health negatively.
I keep myself creative. I make sure to focus for a good amount of hours weekly on my own projects, ideas and writing routine. I like thinking and staring at the computer screen imagining new, different things. I've been actively working on my own projects for the past few months and find that it has only improved my capacity to focus and work.