Matt Bauer

Matt Bauer is the founder of Pedal Brain, which brings advanced technologies to cyclists. He spends a large amount of time eating his own dog food and is a regular presenter to Ruby.mn, the Minnesota Ruby user group. Matt contributed to Obie Fernandez's book, The Rails Way, and is currently writing Data Processing and Visualization with Ruby. His current side projects are all focused on using Ruby with large data sets.

David Berube

David Berube is a Ruby developer, consultant, author, and speaker. He's used both Ruby and Ruby on Rails for several years. He is the author of Practical Ruby Gems, Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails, and the co-author of Practical Rails Plugins. His professional accomplishments include writing Ruby software for The Casting Frontier, one of the world's most successful digital video sites for the commercial casting industry. The Casting Frontier's software has been used to cast commercials for countless Fortune 500 companies. Additionally, he has worked on several other Ruby projects, including working with ThoughtBot on the Rails engine that powers Sermo America's Top Doctor Contest. He lives in New Hampshire, and his hobbies include jazz musicianship, economics, and sleep.

Giles Bowkett

Giles Bowkett began working with the web when Java was about applets, PHP didn't exist, and Perl didn't even have SQL or HTTP libraries. Since then he's worked with Java, Python, PHP, ASP, Flash, and tons of Perl. He began working with Ruby on Rails in late 2005 and has worked exclusively with Ruby since mid-2006. Giles wrote the initial client-facing application for Hulu, the groundbreaking (and revenue-generating) video site, one of the highest-trafficked Rails sites on the web. His blog gets around 50,000 page views per month, frequently appearing in the top 10 on Reddit, dzone, Digg, and Hacker News. His writing has appeared in Wired, XLR8R, The Rubyist, and Advanced Rails Recipes. He's released at least 10 Ruby open source projects, including Archaeopteryx, which is an application interface that generates original drum rhythms. So far in 2008 Giles has spoken at eight conferences—nine including Voices That Matter—and three user groups. He has no degree, but has received professional training in acting, film, realistic drawing, color theory, and pro audio production.

Listen to a conversation with Giles Bowkett

Jared Carroll

Jared Carroll is an experienced software engineer with an interest in development best practices, TDD, and programming patterns. He believes that the language or framework being used by a team doesn't really matter—and that quality results are "all about the developers." Jared has recently relocated from Boston to San Francisco.

Blaine Cook

Blaine Cook is a developer of fine Internet software and evangelist for the open web. While at Twitter he created OAuth, experimented with federating social networks, and taught whales to fly. Before that, he cut his Ruby and Rails teeth building Odeo, and helped move non-profits online. Most recently, he has helped Yahoo! Brickhouse's Fire Eagle soar to new heights. A native of Vancouver, British Columbia, he now lives north of Belfast, Northern Ireland, by way of San Francisco.

Thomas Enebo

Thomas Enebo has been a practitioner of Java for over a decade and he is the co-lead of the JRuby project. Thomas has also been happily using Ruby since 2001. In addition to working on JRuby, Tom is interested in improving the state of alternative languages on the Java Virtual Machine.

Cody Fauser

Cody has enjoyed working with Ruby and Rails for the past three years. He is currently CTO of Shopify, which is the best e-commerce platform on the web. Cody is the author of the PeepCode ActiveMerchant PDF, RJS Templates for Rails, and the upcoming book Rails in a Nutshell. When not staring at a screen, he enjoys attempting to swim across Canadian lakes with his wife Maria and honing his boxing skills.

Obie Fernandez

Obie Fernandez is the CEO and founder of Hashrocket, Inc., a boutique web consultancy and product shop based in Jacksonville Beach, FL, and has more than 12 years of experience as a software developer. He has been hacking computers since he got his first Commodore VIC-20 in the Eighties, and found himself in the right place and time as a programmer on some of the first Java enterprise projects of the mid-Nineties. As a senior consultant at ThoughtWorks, Fernandez specialized in complex custom enterprise software projects. Obie is the series editor of Addison-Wesley's Professional Ruby series and the author of The Rails Way, a comprehensive guide to Ruby on Rails standards and development.

Hal Fulton

Hal Fulton has two degrees in computer science. He has taught at the community college level and also has more than a decade of industry experience as a programmer. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. Hal is the author of The Ruby Way.

James Golick

James Golick's software experience ranges from artificial intelligence to web front-end and JavaScript development. Most recently, James has fallen back in love with web development thanks to Ruby on Rails. Since discovering Rails just over a year ago, James has become a prolific contributor to its open source ecosystem. He is the author of several well-used plug-ins and gems, and a contributor to countless others, including the framework itself. James is an advocate for well-written, well-tested code and he blogs regularly about the practice of developing software. James is the founder of GiraffeSoft, a boutique rails consultancy based in Montreal, Quebec.

Philippe Hanrigou

Philippe Hanrigou has over 10 years of experience developing enterprise software and web applications. As a software engineer and ThoughtWorks consultant, he focuses on designing enterprise software—understanding what makes a good design and implementing practices that encourage it. For the last two years he has enthusiastically embraced Ruby and used it to deliver large enterprise systems. Philippe is the author of Troubleshooting Ruby Processes, an Addison-Wesley Ruby Professional Series Short Cut, which introduces key system diagnostic tools in the context of Ruby development.

Michael Hartl

Michael Hartl is a programmer, entrepreneur, and retreaded theoretical physicist. He is the author of RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails and founder of the Insoshi social networking platform. Before turning to web development, Michael taught introductory physics at Caltech, where he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching. Michael is a graduate of Harvard College and has a Ph.D. in physics from Caltech.

Shane Harvie

Shane Harvie is co-author of Refactoring: Ruby Edition, publishing in 2009, and has been working with Ruby on Rails for over three years. He worked for ThoughtWorks in India, Australia, and the U.S. as a senior consultant, delivering large scale web applications for several clients. Since leaving ThoughtWorks in April 2008, he has started a software company specializing in the iPhone SDK and Ruby on Rails.

Matt Jankowski

Matt Jankowski leads thoughtbot's business development activities, and is in charge of day-to-day operations for the New York City office. Prior to joining thoughtbot, Matt worked as a software engineer for a computing consultancy, as webmaster for an entertainment technology equipment vendor, and as co-founder and lead developer for a publishing industry startup that uses community-driven matching technology to bring together publishers and creative talent. Matt holds a bachelor's degree in technical communication from WPI.

Will Koffel

Will Koffel manages engineering and site operations, and oversees all of Sermo's technology initiatives, including its many industry development partnerships. Will was a founding member of the engineering team at Akamai Technologies, where he developed the initial monitoring and reporting tools for Akamai's worldwide network, moving into a role as lead architect for the Akamai customer portal. Will managed a growing consumer division for Internet advertising company Miva as the Director of Server Development. He re-architected Miva's core consumer search and services platform, scaling to a base of 5 million active users in excess of 50 million monthly page views. Prior to joining Sermo, Will was co-founder and CTO of venture-backed Wis.dm, a consumer social community harnessing the power of Q&A to spark discussions. Will holds Bachelorss degrees in Computer Science and in Music Composition from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Ben Koski

Ben Koski joined The New York Times' Interactive News Technology team in 2007, not knowing a line of Ruby. Since then, Ben has been busy writing Rails applications as part of the Times' online coverage of the 2008 primaries, Olympics, and the November 4 general election. Prior to joining the Times, Ben was a .NET developer for a non-profit consultancy in Silver Spring, MD. Ben is a graduate of Haverford College.

Jon Larkowski

Jon Larkowski holds an electrical engineering degree, has seven years experience in Microsoft-platform web development (sssh...don't tell anyone), experience with Agile methodologies, and full-spectrum skills ranging from database management to graphic design. Following his recent career transition to that of Rails development, he created RubyJax, a Jacksonville Ruby & Rails user group. He often sports a bandana, which puts him in the same category as both Axl Rose and stylish labrador retrievers.

Bryan Liles

"Only write code to make your tests pass." A simple statement for many, but a way of life for Bryan Liles. Writing tests and blogging, speaking, and demonstrating everything associated is a passion that Bryan expends way too much time evangelizing. Bryan started his professional life as a Unix admin and has slowly realized that writing code was his passion, so now he spends all his time hacking on the latest and greatest technologies.

Pat Maddox

Pat Maddox is bouncing around the Ruby industry, having a great time. He's worked for a couple startups, done some independent contracting, and gets his open source fix from being an RSpec core team member. Pat contributed to the RSpec chapter in Obie Fernandez's book, The Rails Way. He is currently way behind schedule on an RSpec/BDD book of his own, also to be published by Addison-Wesley. Pat loves the creativity and friendliness of the Ruby community and considers his closest friendships to be the ones formed over "too many" beers.

Sandi Metz

Sandi has been in software development since before you were born. Her past is checkered; she's been a DBA and a network administrator and in the 1980s spent an entire dog year writing programs in languages that we are now too polite to mention. She's currently a software architect at Duke University where she's spent many years developing in Smalltalk but has been drawing on whiteboards and writing Ruby code since 2005.

Russ Olsen

Russ Olsen has been writing programs for over 25 years. During that time Russ has built systems in such diverse areas as low level hardware control, inventory management and GIS, using everything from assembly language to Ruby. Russ has been coding in, writing about and teaching Ruby since 2001 and is the author of Design Patterns In Ruby. Russ lives outside of Washington DC with his lovely wife, his handsome son and two very ugly turtles, all of whom have to put up with him as he slaves away on a new book about Ruby.

Listen to a conversation with Russ Olsen

Matt Pelletier

Matt Pelletier is a partner at EastMedia, a software, mobile, and business development firm based in New York City. In conjunction with VeriSign, EastMedia sponsored early development of Mongrel for the Apache Heraldry OpenID project. Matt is co-founder of NYC.rb, the New York City Ruby/Rails group. Matt has spoken at RailsConf 2006, MySQLConf 2007 and has presented at other conferences and venues including BarCampNYC, RubyConf 2006, the Google Tech Talk series, and the Federal Reserve. Matt is a co-author of Mongrel: Serving, Deploying, and Extending Your Ruby Applications, and is a contributing author for The Rails Way.

Nick Plante

Nick Plante is a partner in Ubikorp Internet Services, where he specializes in helping web startups accelerate their development with Ruby and Rails. He is also co-organizer of the NH Ruby User Group and Rails Rumble coding competition, and contributes to numerous open source projects. In his copious free time, Nick enjoys independent film, comic books, loud music, and talking about himself in the third person. Nick holds a master's degree in computer science from Northeastern University.

Chad Pytel

Chad Pytel is president of thoughtbot, inc., a software development consulting firm located in Boston and New York that specializes in agile, test-driven web application development using the Ruby on Rails framework. With a history in Java and EJB development, thoughtbot switched to Ruby on Rails as its development platform in 2005. Chad is a staunch advocate of the model-view-controller design pattern and realistic software development. Those philosophies, combined with Ruby on Rails, represent a new, exciting, and better way to develop software. Chad was co-author of Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby and Rails, which was presented in a session on best practice refactoring techniques at RailsConf 2008. Chad is currently at work on a new book, Ruby on Rails AntiPatterns. Chad lives with his wife in Ambler, PA.

Coby Randquist

Coby Randquist has been in the software development business since the late 1980s. Starting out with dBase III and Clipper '87, he eventually became a Microsoft Visual Basic bigot, and later expanded to C# before discovering Ruby in 2005. He is a co-founder of LARuby, and a partner in Confreaks.com. Confreaks was founded in early 2007 to help regional Ruby conferences reach a larger audience by recording the presentations and making them available online. He joined YELLOWPAGES.COM in the spring of 2008 to lead the web application team, and to evangelize Ruby and the Ruby community within the enterprise.

Tammer Saleh

Tammer Saleh is an experienced developer and systems administrator. He has worked for the NCSA, University of Illinois, Caltech's Earthquake Detection Network, and Citysearch.com, performing tasks ranging from network administration to designing artificial intelligence applications. He is the lead developer for the Shoulda Rails plug-in, as well as for the LDAP-Activerecord gateway, and he presented "Angels and Daemons" for RailsConf 2007.

Foy Savas

Foy is a director at Unversive, a consulting company focused on making your good ideas realities. His work in Ruby has mostly been in Rails, but over the past year, he's taken several Merb applications, both small and large, into production. He's also the author of Addison-Wesley’s upcoming book, The Merb Way, and a contributor to both Merb and DataMapper. As a Boston resident living in the South End and a retired food connoisseur, Foy can tell you where the best restaurants in town are, no matter what your preference.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz

Ezra Zygmuntowicz is a founder and developer at Engine Yard, the leading provider of fully managed Ruby and Rails Hosting and Deployment. He has been active in the Ruby community for over four years, and has contributed to many open source projects, including Rails, Merb, Rack and Rubinius. He is co-author of Deploying Rails Applications, published by The Pragmatic Programmers, and speaks at Ruby, Rails and Cloud Computing related events throughout the country.