About me

DebMy name is Deb Bassett. I’m a freelance application developer based in the UK.

I’ve been working almost exclusively with Ruby (and Rails) for the last couple of years and the nine years I’ve been in the industry has included much Perl, Java, PHP & databases on UNIX systems, generally for the web. I’m an experienced developer, and take pride in building clean, well thought out and tested solutions.

I started freelancing in February 2006 and I’ve been lucky enough to work on some great projects for companies, directly or indirectly, including the National Science Museum, BBC and O’Reilly. In the past I’ve worked as a full time software engineer for Ananova (remember - the first virtual newscaster?), Orange and Energis (now Cable & Wireless).

Hire Me

If you have a project you’d like to discuss, please do get in touch. Currently, I’m available for work from the beginning of June. I generally prefer to work with Ruby but I’m open to working with other languages, whatever’s appropriate for the job in hand, I’m pretty flexible.

If you’d like to see my formal career details, please contact me for my CV.

Live and Work

My office At Old Broadcasting HouseI live in Otley, a market town to the north of Leeds. I love the fact that Otley sits right in the countryside yet could quite happily survive on it’s own. There’s something daft like 14 pubs, 4 butchers, 3 veg shops and 4 bakers to choose from, we’re very lucky. As much as I like Otley, sometimes it’s healthy to leave, so as well as working from home, I also rent a desk at the very cool co-working space at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds and spend a few days a week working there.

Community

I have a tendency to get involved in community projects - you may of heard of GeekUp, I’m your friendly Leeds organiser, with much help from Rob Lee, Richard Hamer and James Hoskins. Normally we hang out at the Lounge on the 3rd Wednesday of the month, geeks of any kind welcome. In February, Christian Heilmann of Yahoo! fame, came up from London to spread some YUI love.

I was also one of the BarCamp Leeds organisers and built the backend to the dudey NorthPack site. More locally, I’ve just started helping the chaps at the Otley Courthouse with organising a rather fabulous 4 day Science Festival, and also rebuilding their web site (it’s not done yet!).

I was interviewed on O’Reilly Scenius just after GeekUp launched in Leeds last June - you can read more about the Leeds geek scene there (and some more about me too).

Me me, us

Rob is my very cool, geeky husband and we got married last year. My Dad surprised me by driving me to the wedding in a lorry (this is a good thing) and we had some freakishly good weather.

Six of us look after an allotment. We grow stuff that you can eat like onions, potatoes, chillis and courgettes. It’s has all the creative fun of making stuff, but at a more gentle pace.

Rob and I have travelled lots. We were lucky enough to be able to take 10 months off real life to travel the world for much snowboarding and sun. We blogged as we travelled.

More recently our travel has been based around conferences (XTech, Rails Conf, Reboot, BarCamps) and we’ve managed to get a few snowboarding trips in.