The Pragmatic Studio is a software training company. We're here because we want to help software developers continually improve their skills and their lives. We do this by offering hands-on public and private training courses, and working with authors of The Pragmatic Bookshelf books to create courses that are both timely and relevant.

Our courses are unique because they're taught by programmers who are well-known experts in their field. Equally important, our instructors know how to clearly and effectively teach what they know. We're a small company without a lot of distractions or overhead. That means we can focus on what's important to us: quality instruction, well-organized events, exceptional customer service, and building long-term relationships with our students. By attending a Studio, you'll get the most up-to-date and authoritative developer training around.

Mike and Nicole Clark

Mike and Nicole Clark started The Pragmatic Studio in 2005 by offering the first-ever Ruby on Rails training. Back then, folks were just getting into Rails and many were looking to make a career change. Dave Thomas and Mike Clark had written the Rails book, and thought it would be fun to teach in a setting where they could work with students one-on-one. So we announced a public, open-enrollment class. We figured we might be able to teach a couple classes if the first one went well.

Since then we've put on over 50 public classes on a variety of topics across the country, and have had the pleasure of teaching over 2,000 developers. The Pragmatic Studio has grown into not only a full-time business for us, but also a supportive, friendly community of developers that has far exceeded our expectations. Our alumni have gone on to build some amazing applications and become leaders in the community.

Mike is also an independent consultant, author, and programmer through Clarkware Consulting. He's the author of Advanced Rails Recipes, co-author of Agile Web Development with Rails, and author of Pragmatic Project Automation. You can check out his latest endeavors on his blog.

Nicole has been called the Cruise Director in the Studio. Simply put, she keeps everything running smoothly. Nicole is usually the first person you meet, whether by e-mail, phone call, or when you show up the first morning of a Studio. Nicole runs the show!

Our Instructors

Dave Thomas

Dave Thomas has been writing software since the mid '70s, and hopes one day to get it right. In the meantime, he's the co-author of The Pragmatic Programmer, Programming Ruby, and Agile Web Development with Rails. Along with Andy Hunt, they run The Pragmatic Programmers.

Chad Fowler

Chad Fowler is a well-known author and Ruby and Rails trainer and consultant. He is cofounder of Ruby Central, a non-profit corporation responsible for the annual International Ruby and Rails Conferences, and is a leading contributor and frequent speaker in the communities. Chad is the author of Rails Recipes and The Passionate Programmer, a contributor to Programming Ruby, and CTO of InfoEther.

Daniel Steinberg

Daniel Steinberg is the author of the book Cocoa Programming: A Quick Start for Developers and the upcoming book iPad Programming. He writes feature articles for Apple's ADC web site and is a regular contributor to Mac Devcenter. He has presented at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, MacWorld, MacHack, and other Mac developer conferences.

Matt Drance

Matt Drance is the owner of Bookhouse Software, an iPhone and iPad app development company, and an eight-year Apple veteran. As Apple's Application Frameworks Evangelist, Matt helped shape the APIs in the iPhone SDK and worked with hundreds of third-party developers to build many of the apps you use today. He was an annual speaker at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and iPhone Tech Talks, and his orientation videos in the iPhone Dev Center have been viewed by thousands of iPhone developers. At Bookhouse, Matt now builds his own products and works regularly with a number of clients.

Bill Dudney

Bill Dudney formerly co-taught our iPhone Programming course and co-created the material with Daniel Steinberg. Bill recently accepted a job at Apple as an Application Frameworks Evangelist. Congrats, Bill!

Jim Weirich

Jim Weirich has been active in the software development world for over twenty-five years. Jim is very active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects including the Rake build system, the FlexMock mocking library, and the RubyGems package management software. Jim is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase, LLC.

Joe O'Brien

Joe O'Brien has spent his career as a developer, project manager, and everything in between. Before helping found EdgeCase, LLC, Joe was a developer with ThoughtWorks and spent much of his time working with large J2EE and .NET systems for Fortune 500 companies. He also co-founded the Columbus Ruby Brigade and helped organize the Chicago Area Ruby Users Group.

Stuart Halloway

Stuart Halloway is the CEO of Relevance, an agile software development shop based in Durham, N.C., USA. Stuart has twenty years experience in software development, and over a decade of experience as a teacher and writer. He is the author of the book Programming Clojure.

Rich Hickey

Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure, is an independent software designer, consultant, and application architect with over 20 years of experience in all facets of software development. Rich has worked on scheduling systems, broadcast automation, audio analysis and fingerprinting, database design, yield management, exit poll systems, and machine listening, in a variety of languages.

Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith has, at various times, been a network administrator, DBA, developer, team lead and trainer over his 14 year career. He first learned about Erlang in 2006 via Joe Armstrong's excellent book and has never looked back. Kevin is the founder of Hypothetical Labs, a consultancy focused on helping software teams learn about and adopt Erlang for maximum success. He is also the author of the popular screencast series Erlang In Practice.

Ryan Irelan

Ryan Irelan is a noted expert on ExpressionEngine development. He has created a wildly popular series of training videos, the ExpressionEngine Screencasts, and is the author of the book ExpressionEngine 2.0: A Quick-Start Guide. Ryan also runs the premiere website on ExpressionEngine information and news, EE Insider.

As the Technology and Development Director at Happy Cog West, Ryan builds customized, large-scale ExpressionEngine websites every day. He has been a featured speaker at conferences covering ExpressionEngine, including the EE Roadshow in Seattle and the ExpressionEngine & CodeIgniter Conference in the Netherlands.

Scott Chacon

Scott Chacon is a Git evangelist and Ruby developer employed at Logical Awesome working on GitHub. He is the author of the book Pro Git and the Git Internals PDF, as well as the maintainer of http://git-scm.com and the Git Community Book. Scott has presented at RailsConf, RubyConf, Google, and a number of local groups in addition to teaching corporate training on Git across the country.