Learn Directly from Pragmatic Authors

Mike Clark is an independent consultant, author, trainer, and programmer. He's the co-author of Agile Web Development with Rails, and author of Pragmatic Project Automation and Advanced Rails Recipes. He co-teaches the Ruby on Rails Studio and the Advanced Rails Studio, and speaks at The Rails Edge. He helped build one of the first commercial Rails applications and continues working on other Rails projects through his company, Clarkware Consulting.

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. He co-teaches many of the Pragmatic Studios and speaks at The Rails Edge. Along with Andy Hunt, they run The Pragmatic Programmers.

Chad Fowler has been a software developer and manager for some of the world's largest corporations. He recently lived and worked in India, setting up and leading an offshore software development center. He is cofounder of Ruby Central, Inc., a non-profit corporation responsible for the annual International Ruby and Rails Conferences, and is a leading contributor in the Ruby community. Chad is a contributor and editor for numerous books and is author of the recently released, Rails Recipes. He co-teaches many of the Pragmatic Studios and speaks at The Rails Edge.

Jim Weirich is a developer for EdgeCase, a Rails software firm located in Columbus, Ohio. Jim has over twenty-five years of experience in software development. He has worked with real-time data systems for testing jet engines, networking software for information systems, and image processing software for the financial industry. Jim is active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software. He co-teaches the Test-Driven Development with Rails Studio and speaks at The Rails Edge.

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. He co-teaches the Test-Driven Development with Rails Studio.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz is a co-founder of EngineYard.com, a scalable Rails hosting service. He is the author of the upcoming Rails Deployment book for the Pragmatic Programmers and has contributed many open source Ruby and Rails related projects such as BackgrounDrb, ez-where and Merb. He is a speaker at The Rails Edge, the 2006 & 2007 RailsConf and the 2007 SDForum Ruby conference. He has been working with Ruby for almost 4 years now and picked up Rails in the summer of 2004. In his spare time he likes to hack Ruby and Erlang and tinker with his vintage 54 VW beetle.

Justin Gehtland is a cofounder of Relevance, LLC, a training and consulting company located in the Research Triangle, North Carolina. In addition to Relevance's ongoing client work, he is the co-author of Rails for Java Programmers and co-creator of the open source Streamlined framework. Justin has been an application developer since 1990, a web application developer since 1995, and a project manager on numerous successful projects. He is the co-author of Pragmatic Ajax (The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2005), Spring: A Developer's Notebook (O'Reilly, 2005), and Better, Faster, Lighter Java (O'Reilly 2004).

Stuart Halloway is a cofounder of Relevance, LLC, a training and consulting company located in the Research Triangle, North Carolina. In addition to Relevance's ongoing client work, he is a coauthor of the upcoming book Rails for Java Programmers and co-creator of the open source Streamlined framework. Stuart was the CTO at DevelopMentor before founding Relevance. He has also worked as a lead engineer and project manager, shipping successful projects for Prentice Hall, National Geographic, and Duke University's Humanities Computing Facility. Stuart is the author of Component Development for the Java Platform.

Marcel Molina Jr. is a member of the Rails core team. He went from being a literature major to a programmer. In his transition from natural language to machine language, he found Ruby an elegant balance of dynamic, pragmatic, and "humane". And then came along Rails... He lives in Austin's lush and twisty Travis Heights in the shadows of ancient, gnarled live oaks.

Jenifer Hanen is an interface design specialist with over a decade of experience as an independent web designer, educator, and mobile consultant. She believes that a good web site should say it all in color, clean typography, photos and a minimalist aesthetic. She completed her Masters degree in Computer Science in Multimedia Systems in Dublin, Ireland. Jenifer has been bitten by the mobile blogging / camera phone bug and last summer's mobile documentary project, Around Ireland, was a finalist in the 2007 SXSW Interactive Web Awards. She is currently doing web development with Easy Designs, and this spring she worked on projects for Bertucci's restaurants, New England Dodge, and Autobytel's MyRide.com.