Peter Cooper
Who is Peter Cooper?
If anyone official asks, I’m a software developer, but in reality I’m a publisher and author who now only does a little software development on the side. I’m not particularly well known for any one thing but have a lot of different projects going at the same time. I’m the editor of Ruby Inside, curator of RubyFlow, founder of coder.io, publisher of Ruby Weekly and JavaScript Weekly, author of “Beginning Ruby” published by Apress, and, as they say, “much more!” I wobbled between my interests in development and publishing for a long time before finally realizing in the last few years I could bring the two together in a unique way.
Where and when did you start programming?
It was before I can remember. My parents have pictures of me playing with computers from about the age of 2 and I knew I could already do some basic coding back to where my first memories are at about 6. Back then the only language I knew of was BASIC which came as standard on any microcomputers we had. The main computer I grew up with was the BBC Micro, a mostly UK only computer built by Acorn (who had a big part in founding ARM) and sponsored by the BBC. I had my first PC – a 286 with 20MB hard disk – at about the age of 8. At 9, I started to learn C using Borland Turbo C. In the mid 90s I moved to Turbo Pascal, then Perl in 1996, and then Ruby in 2004.
Why Ruby/Rails?
I had been working with Perl for 8 years by the time I discovered Ruby and Rails, and even though I liked the ideas I saw in Rails, I initially tried to port them into Perl. It was a total disaster though and I had a project to do that would benefit from using Rails. I gave it a go while vowing not to seriously learn Ruby but.. I was drawn in! I haven’t touched Perl again since 2007.
What does your typical day look like?
I don’t have a typical day. A lot of people say that but in my case it’s scarily true. Sometimes I get up early in the morning, sometimes late in the evening – I have a very freewheeling schedule and rarely sleep regular hours. The only thing that’s fixed is that I have dinner with my wife and daughter at about 6pm – everything else is flexible! I nearly always check my iPad when I get up in order to see if anyone’s messaged me on Twitter, as well as to look at Hacker News and Reddit. I tend to let my e-mail wait a while until I’ve got some other jobs out of the way because I can get stuck in my e-mails for hours!
What do you do in your free time?
I have a wife and daughter, so any free time I have is usually quickly sucked up by them! Separate to family life, though, every now and then I have a computer game I’m obsessed about and will spend some time on that (currently Gran Turismo 5 and Minecraft), but usually I have 101 projects going on at once and can find lots of work to bounce between. Since I enjoy most of work, I have no problem not having any “hobbies.” Work is my hobby!
Current favorite apps?
On the desktop: Safari 5, Limechat, VMware Fusion, LittleSnapper, Dropbox, 1Password.
On the Web: GMail, Google Reader, Instapaper, Delicious, PayPal.
On the iPad: Adobe Ideas, Reeder, Twitter, SampleLab.
What OS do you prefer?
On the desktop, Mac OS X is my main choice. I was a full-time Windows user until 2004 when I got my first Mac, an iBook. Linux had won me over on the server side of things and I wanted something that gave me the benefits of Unix while still being able to run apps like Photoshop and “look good.” I wasn’t much of a gamer so Windows didn’t have much lasting appeal for me and a jump to the Mac seemed like a good idea. I’m now about 10 Macs in and haven’t regretted it at all. That said, I’m continually impressed by the advances made in the Linux world and do a lot of my development in it through a permanently running VM on my Mac.
Small picture for your Workplace?
Favorite: Color, Font, Language, JS Framework?
I used to have favorite colors but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to appreciate everything – even pink! The same goes for fonts though I have a soft spot for Akzidenz Grotesk – it was the inspiration for Helvetica. Naturally, Ruby is my favorite language but JavaScript is where I think things are headed (for now). And in terms of JS frameworks, jQuery is where all my money is for now.
Name something that has inspired you recently?
The explosion in the Hacker News community of interest in “e-mail newsletters.” I’ve noticed the trend over the last year and been inspired by people like Chris McCann (of StartupDigest) and Jason L Baptiste who’ve picked up on it. I turned this inspiration into Ruby Weekly and JavaScript Weekly which have attracted almost 6000 subscribers between them in just the last couple of months.
I’ve also been heavily inspired by Amy Hoy, an Austria-based American designer and freethinker who’s recently been making big strides into building webapps and “infoproducts” that she and her husband sell. You can learn more about this at http://unicornfree.com/.
What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?
I was only employed full time for 10 months after leaving school. I had two jobs. The first was as a press representative and general dogsbody at a Web design agency in London. The second was starting a Web design department at a printing company.
What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?
Taking inspiration from Amy Hoy, I want to move more into selling my own products. My publishing work over the last few years has mostly been funded by advertisers, but advertisers can be fickle and it’s hard work to keep them interested. Selling directly to customers, however, just means producing things they want to buy. Now that I have two successful mailing lists and a handful of successful blogs and social sites, I hope I can produce and sell things that my large audience would find interesting. If I can, life would be a lot simpler!
