I'm Andrew Stewart — AirBlade is my company.
I have been writing software since 2000. I started with Perl at Reuters, moved into J2EE at Razorfish, and continued with Java at Aspect Capital and the UK government. In 2006 I went solo and switched to Ruby, writing my first Rails app a few months later (amazingly it's still running). I have been using Ruby and Rails ever since and I'm very happy with the combination of Rails, Hotwire, and Tailwind. I have also written more Vimscript than I ever expected 😂
I have worked in several entirely unrelated fields including fintech, academia, fashion, and national security. I set up and ran a subsidiary in Germany for a few years.
I have an M.Eng from Cambridge University (Trinity College, graduated in 1999).
Outside work I love windsurfing and CrossFit.
Launched: October 2017
DoubleAgent automates time-consuming book-keeping tasks in FreeAgent, e.g. auto-reconciling Stripe and GoCardless payouts.
It hides considerable complexity with a clear UI and saves people a lot of time. It is built on top of Factor, my Ruby client for FreeAgent's API.
Customers' comments: extremely useful
, what a great tool
, a big time-saver
, your pricing is way too low!
Launched: July 2008
Sparkle is a sample-tracking system for Fashion PR agencies and brands. Can be used in English or German.
It's overdue a fresh coat of paint but it works brilliantly.
Customers said, It has transformed my business
, It is a competitive advantage for us
, The service Andrew provides is impeccable
.
Launched: June 2024
Swimscan helps open-water swimming venues manage their swimmers, bookings, and swims.
It combines RFID scanning and payments in a lightweight web application that can run off a 4G phone.
One of the biggest swim lakes in southern England said, What used to take 30 mins now takes 2 mins. It frees up staff to boost the safety team on the water.
Launched: July 2021
LOR Hub helps manage the writing of recommendation letters for lab members and academics, from collating all the necessary information to tracking progress against deadlines. Used at MIT.
Early feedback: very useful
, we are much more organised now
.
Launched: August 2017
Factor is a zero-dependency Ruby client for FreeAgent's API. It's used by DoubleAgent for all interaction with FreeAgent, and has shown its mettle and ergonomics over 7 years of constant production use.
Beyond CRUD of FreeAgent's resources, it handles typing, auto-pagination, automatic back-off and retry, getting and refreshing OAuth access tokens via command line or web, curl output for debugging, and more.
Launched: March 2010
I wrote PeepCode's Vim screencast, one of their top three bestsellers. It was one of the few kept by Pluralsight when they acquired PeepCode. It still sells well after all this time.
People said, terrific, full of gems
, a must-have
, so much good stuff here
, helped me immensely
.
It wasn't my first time as a PeepCode author: back in 2008 I wrote Rails 2 Plugin Patterns, a 100 page PDF. There weren't many good resources at the time for learning how to extend Rails.
Outstanding work; this has bumped up my efficiency and knowledge tremendously
, fantastic
, very well written, and you explain complicated nasty stuff with nice simple examples.
Relaunched: May 2021
Multifactor authentication for Rails 6 and 7, designed in accordance with the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard.
Quo Vadis makes it simple to integrate 2FA and modern authentication requirements into your Rails app, with a minimal footprint.
Launched: April 2022
A Stimulus-powered, accessible datepicker which uses strftime directives to parse/format dates.
stimulus-datepicker makes it trivial to add a datepicker to your Rails app.
Launched: February 2013
I wrote and maintain this Vim plugin which shows git diff markers in the sign column and makes it easy to preview and stage hunks and partial hunks.
Wonderful
– Greg Kroah-Hartman (Linux kernel maintainer). Awesome
– Ilya Grigorik (Principal Engineer at Shopify). This might be the best vim plugin I've ever seen
– Steve Klabnik (Rust core team).
7.6k stars on GitHub as of April 2022.