About - Technomage, Michael Latta
I have been building software for way too long. I have been a freelancer for more than 9 years. I care about building quality software that meets the business need.
I believe in using the right tool for a job, and have used a lot of them. I have gone through trying to use cool technologies, it costs too much for the project, and in the end even the programmers are not happy. This is not to say using new tools is a bad thing, only that they should not be used for the first time on a project. As a craftsman, it is my job to know my tools well before I use them on real projects.
Tools I know well and use currently and on a daily basis are Rails, jQuery, KnockoutJS, Javascript, Objective-C, SQL, Cucumber, Capybara, and Frank.
In addition to technical work, I look at every project's business aspects, because part of my job is to help refine and balance the requirements, cost, and value. Projects fail when projects ignore unreasonable cost, or unreasonable requirements. They can also be improved by considering more challenging requirements when justified by generated value.
I had the opportunity to work with Michael for an extended period of time and valued every minute of that time. His professionalism, attention to details, quality of work, and technological vision is unmatched in my experience working with programmers. If you need Rails work done, project management expertise, software architecture development, I would without hesitation recommend Michael as the best I've ever worked with. I knew that when work needed to be done and it was in his project queue that the solutions he developed would be well built, tested, and would not break, and as someone in a position where things can't break, that's a great comfort. I very much hope to partner with Michael again at some point in the future, as he was great to work with personally and professionally.
Michael Latta has been a tremendous contributor to the success of our project.
He is an expert in Ruby on Rails and has made good choices and recommendations for rapid development frameworks and tools for our project. His approach to development is practical, test-driven, and has produced good quality code with minimum iterations for issue resolution. He has provided solid pointers and suggestions in areas outside of the core project development, including hosting, application and web servers, database servers, tools and source repository. He was able to assist with the initial hosting before the project transitioned to a self-managed environment.
Michael has worked well in a collaborative setting, helping and guiding other programmers along the way. He has been flexible and adaptable to the quirks of a non-profit volunteer organization. He is also independent and self directed, with a strong ability to grasp and implement new business requirements quickly.
We have greatly appreciated Michael's participation in this project and look forward to continuing our relationship and working with him in future.