Who is Eloy Durán?
A 29 years old Dutch guy with Bolivian heritage, born and raised in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), for whom the world revolves around musical rhythms. Not a hardcore geek, or at least never thought of
myself as a geek. Yet, here I am, so there you go.
Where and when did you start programming?
I started playing a bit with BASIC around the age of twelve. But it was just fooling around a bit, not sure if you’d really consider it programming, let’s call it doodling. It was by chance that I got into programming again when I started working as a system administrator, about seven years ago. Which in itself was by chance, as is the story of my complete professional career. So you could say it really started out of an ‘itch to scratch’. And I have a lot of these itches, despite my daily shower!
Why Ruby?
As a system administrator I had to do quite a bit of scripting. As I’m quite anal about code having to be readable, and being the autodidact that I am, I scoured the internet for scripting languages and eventually stumbled upon Ruby. (It made the job a lot more fun too! As I have to admit that system administration, for me, feels more like a whac-a-mole type of game. And I’m not really the type to hit animals and enjoy it. YMMV.)
Don’t mistake me for a language geek, though, it was all out of pragmatism. I think that last word might have even tipped me off to Ruby, as this was around the time Ruby on Rails was released for the first time and looking up the word ‘pragmatic’ in the dictionary almost resulted in a picture of Matz and DHH ;)
Around that time I started playing with RubyCocoa, and became a contributor not long thereafter. This was my first real foray into open-source land and I guess that has really contributed to the fact that I’ve kept using Ruby. Because amongst tons of joy, working on open-source software has also brought me the great job I currently have at Fingertips.
What does your typical day look like?
Trying to get up on time, walk our dog, and (trying to) have something decent for breakfast. Then hop in my wooden shoes and onto my bike, or boat, and head to our office (which is conveniently situated in a windmill in a tulip field!) for a day of work on client work, which is mostly Ruby on Rails, or one of our own products. The latter involves Objective-C and Nu for iOS, and MacRuby for a desktop application and making fun of eachother.
What do you do in your free time?
Foremost a lot of walking with our dog, although most spectators will probably think the dog is walking us, and they’d probably be right… Then, when I’m not working on MacRuby or numerous other open-source libraries, I make and listen to a lot of music, watch some tv-series (“EX-TERRR-MINATE” anyone?), and play (video) games with friends. Besides that, my fiancée and I have been in the process of getting a new houseboat build, which takes quite some effort as well, but once finished just sitting in the living room and enjoying the view/being happy with ourselves will probably be our new number one hobby.
Current favorite apps?
* Ableton Live
* Echofon
* Spotify
* GitHub
* StreamToMe
* IRB
* The new public transport chip card system, I like confusing the hell out of it
* And last, but not least, Dictionary.app
What OS do you prefer?
Speaking purely from a user point of view (or ‘what would aunt Jannie think’ as I like to call it) it would definitely be OS X. In general the environment seems to encourage better user-experience in applications.
When working on music, I do not like to have to think about the computer too much, but ‘just have it work’. Which is a thing where OS X really shines, as Apple makes both the hardware and software, there are only so many combinations of hardware that need to be tested. Very different from my Windows-era, where you had to think about things like which USB chipset you have. And again, aunt Jannie would probably just think ‘my-ass-be set what?!’. Not very friendly, to say the least.
Small picture for your Workplace?
On this particular day, I was working on the music for a commercial of our iOS app ‘Crop and Straighten’. From the middle to all other directions that’s; Rebirth on the iPad, RubyKaigi 2009 lanyard (the only one I’ve ever saved), xmas lights (because it’s always xmas in my heart!), coffee (pretty self-explanatory), and the Unicode bible
(because it’s oh-so important to respect international users! And NO, an ‘a’ without acute accent is *not* the same as an ‘a’ with acute accent. And definitely *not* an “illegal character”! Whatever that might even mean, should we deport them…?).
Favorite: IDE, Language, JS Framework?
I currently use (Mac)Vim. I love it’s speed and splitviews, but I don’t really dig the ‘make a sandwich with only two keystrokes’ kind of user-experience. On top of that I’m not a big tweaker of config files, so I probably miss out on a lot. I can’t remember ever having felt comfortable with any IDE, so for coding I prefer to have one editor and do the rest from the command-line. This way I don’t feel I need to learn similar tools over and over again. At least, that’s what my uninformed gut feeling tells me, but I like it that way.
I don’t really have a favorite language, but the most recent addition is Nu. Its syntax comes from lisp and macros have proven to be very useful *and* fun, by which I mean time-consuming.
It’s been a while since I’ve done any serious JS programming, but for applications I prefer the Prototype.js way over the inline jQuery way. It made unit testing a lot easier, in my opinion, and I’m a TDD type of guy. But I won’t pass judgement on you if you’re not, because again, aunt Jannie just wants it to work and for all she cares whenever she types in a search query it shoots of an email to a team of all-knowing pinguins on the Galapagos Islands who fax her back the results. We might call this AJAX, she would say that that’s a cleaning product, so it really doesn’t matter.
Name something that has inspired you recently?
With regards to life and music, I’m always inspired by my fiancée, family, and friends. For communication, over a medium such as the internet, a mixture of the no-nonsense and precise approach of my colleagues and super-positive approach of people like Florian Hanke and Aaron Patterson. Bonus points to Aaron for his typical enterprisey profile ;)
What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?
Full time employment, but only within companies where people are individuals, not numbers. Which feels about the same as when I worked freelance, but with the added benefits of a good employer who understands how the real-world operates. However, this means that there aren’t many other companies that fit my needs, in which case I’d
prefer freelance over steady income, any day.
My motto has always been, if you’re not happy where you are and have tried everything in your own power to improve things, then leave and move on. Don’t let steady income win over day-to-day happiness, as long as you just do what you need to do to make ends meet at the end of the day. And trust me, even things like hauling automobile parts around in a factory will be fun for a few months and at the very least will put things into perspective.
Don’t forget that you can always still hack on open-source software and fight crime and save the world by night! Even sounds better that way on your twitter profile.
What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?
* Get our new houseboat finished
* Release a few MacRuby related projects
* Work on music regularly and release it
* Beating Laurent Sansonetti’s and Ninh Bui’s bottoms in a ‘born to be alive’ dance battle
* Spend left over Apple Developer Connection support hours on getting them to show Laurent how to perform better in the aforementioned battle
* Reaching the age of 30 and become all responsible and such, which I keep hearing about
