Who is Josh Abernathy?

I live in Seattle with my awesome wife and baby-morphing-into-a-toddler. I work at GitHub, mostly on GitHub for Mac. (If you haven’t checked it out, you totally should. I hear it’s great: http://mac.github.com/)

What does your typical day look like?

I’m usually at my desk by about 8:30a and I spend some time getting caught up with whatever I missed on the internets while I slept. That means email, twitter, support queue, etc.

I start my actual “work” by trying to figure out what I want to get done that day. For me, that’s helpful because it gives me something immediate to work towards. Longterm I might be working on SuperMegaAwesomeFeature which requires 4 new views, 2 big refactors, and some new git interaction. But maybe today my goal is just to get the UI finished for that 1 new view. I have an immediate, reachable piece of work. It’s all just mental games, but it works for me.

Then lots of coffee and music happen and some code pops out. Repeat that for a while, interspersed with some lunch and animated gifs, and that’s my day.

What do you do in your free time?

This is gonna sound super nerdy, but when I’m not hanging out with my family, I’m hacking on my various side projects. For me, programming is legitimately fun. I *want* to do it in my spare time. I don’t want to know what will happen the day that changes. Probably the universe will explode. Probably.

Where and when did you start programming?

I started with Chipmunk Basic  back when I was 11 or 12 or something. It’s mostly a blur but I have a distinct memory of being totally confused the first time I got a C book from the library.

I’ve always been a Mac user so after doing some obligatory time in BASIC, I moved on to C and the old Macintosh Toolbox (GWorldPtr! CopyBits!). When Mac OS X came out, I learned Objective-C and Cocoa.

I did some Java stuff at college, a little bit of Ruby, and a lot more Cocoa. My Java web app experience turned me off to web development entirely. It wasn’t until my recent brush with Sinatra that I realized web apps didn’t have to be an awful, XML-ridden, God-forsaken messes. Who knew. Next you’ll be telling me web browsers have hardware-accelerated animations or some such nonsense.

These days I still mostly do Cocoa.

Favorite: Programming Languages, Frameworks?

Objective-C. (I know that probably makes me sound like an Apple brainwashee.)

To be trendy I guess I should probably say Haskell or something that compiles down to JavaScript and involves an allusion to coffee. (Caramel Macchiato Script is totally the future, guys. The creamy, delicious future.)

But seriously, I love love *love* Objective-C’s faux-named parameters. It’s such an undervalued syntax but it does wonders for readability and self-documentation. Parts of the language are crufty, no doubt, but you’ll have to claw named parameters from my cold, Cocoa-y hands.

That said, there are things I love about Ruby, and Clojure fascinates me.

What OS do you prefer?

Mac OS X.

Current favorite apps?

That’s a hard one. I don’t use many apps.

I just got iA Writer a month or so ago and it does some interesting things. I continue to appreciate Twitter for Mac’s willingness to think outside the box. I use Reeder for Mac tons.

For non-Cocoa programming, I usually use TextMate. It’s kinda interesting—I’ve tried switching to Sublime Text 2 and BBEdit and neither have stuck. I can’t really pinpoint what it is about TextMate that keeps me coming back, but back I always come. Maybe it’s just Stockholm Syndrome.

Oh and GitHub for Mac. (lolz.)

Small picture for your Workplace?

Name something that has inspired you recently?

It’s hard to answer this without sounding super-pretentious. Reading about UX and design always inspires me. When I see other companies or products elegantly solving problems, it makes me want to hole-up with my computer and write code nonstop for months.

What do you prefer? Freelance work or full time employment?

Full-time. At the end of the day, a freelancer is a hired gun. It’s the difference between Star Wars if Hans was *really* just in it for the money, and Star Wars as we know it (George Lucas lolz aside). Hired guns are cool. People who believe in the cause make for better stories.

What are your goals for 2011?

Make GitHub for Mac more awesome. The End.

Who is Jon Maddox?

Just a guy that loves to make stuff. I love software because it lets me execute on an idea at 3am with zero raw materials. I love mobile dev because of the amazing accessibility of data. I live in Richmond, Va with my amazing wife Steph (@stephmaddox) and pug Tater. I’ve been accused of having excessive opinions but consider that a strength. I’m the loud guy at the bar talking with his hands.

What does your typical day look like?

I get up and brush my teeth, go to the bathroom, go downstairs, make coffee, let the Tater man outside, smoke a cigarette, pour my coffee and go upstairs to my office, in this order. I literally do this exact same thing every morning.

After that I check the Campfire backlogs and stars. The rest of the day is spent hacking on fun, cool, stuff. My actual work day is almost never the same and thats exactly how I like it.

What do you do in your free time?

Embarrassingly, I spend a lot of my free time programming. I have a lot of personal projects for my home and friends. This summer I’ve taken on a project to convert an arcade cabinet. I’ve put a PC inside of it and hooked the controls and arcade monitor to the PC. It runs over 8000 arcade titles as well as a huge library of console games from the NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis. It’s been pretty fun.

Where and when did you start programming?

Like a lot of people, I started with frontend web work. I started making my own websites for fun. I then moved into dynamic stuff like ASP, then on to Java, then on to PHP, then on to Ruby, then on to Objective-C.  I’m in love with the web and HTTP. Almost every app I work on for iOS involves it somehow. Being able to do both puts an amazing amount of power in your hands. I freaking love it. Its just so much fun to bust out quick tools.

Favorite: Programming Languages, Frameworks?

Ruby and Objective-C take up most of my time. Nothing bootstraps a project faster than Ruby. Between Sinatra and Heroku and a sprinkle of Redis, its amazing what you can get accomplished in a couple of hours these days. Objective-C is a love hate relationship. There’s a lot in the language I like, and a lot I don’t. But in the end, its an amazing means to an end when you end up with amazingly modern software on your phone.

What OS do you prefer?

Mac OS X of course. Photoshop and a UNIX shell? How is this up for argument?

Current favorite apps?

Desktop: These days I don’t really use any apps on the desktop outside of editors. Propane, the native campfire app, is crucial. Other than that my days are spent in the shell, Textmate, Xcode, Propane, iChat, Chrome, and GitHub for Mac of course.

iOS: Summizer, Instagram, Twitter for Mac,  and iTeleport. I use iTeleport almost all day long. I use a desktop at home, and being able to pop on via my iPhone or iPad with iTeleport is HUGE. I can just quickly check messages and campfire in just 2 seconds. Campfire is so bad on the iPad that I actually just VNC into my desktop with iTeleport and use Propane. Sad really.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Name something that has inspired you recently?

Finally deciding to join GitHub. We’ve all been friends for so long and finally ACTUALLY being part of this team is amazing. There’s so many smart, interesting, creative, hillarious , and fun people here, its hard not to be inspired every single day.

What do you prefer? Freelance work or full time employment?

It really depends. Freelance can be fun because you’re working on all kinds of different things. But sometimes its nice to be realllllly married to a project. To give it that sexy love it really needs. The problem is it’s hard to find one of those things.

What are your goals for 2011?

Ship hard, what else?

Who is Scott Jehl?

I’m a Boston-based web designer. I work at Filament Group and I’m pretty active in the open-source web community. In the past, I’ve enjoyed speaking at conferences such as Voices That Matter, writing for sites such as A List Apart, and I recently co-authored the book Designing with Progressive Enhancement (New Riders, 2010). I’m a jQuery team member, most recently leading the development of jQuery Mobile.

Where and when did you start programming?

I began dabbling with the web while working on my degree in Graphic Design at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL. Their program was print-focused and there wasn’t much available at the time in the way of formal web design training, so I spent my free time bouncing between “View Source” on various websites and learning from books, like Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards.

Why JavaScript?

I love working with JavaScript, but I didn’t choose to develop in it for any particular reason other than that it’s what comes with working web standards – and I really do love the web as a medium in itself. The universal applicability of JavaScript is amazing; I love that you can use a single, relatively standard coding approach to reach so many people and devices. Also, I enjoy the challenges of making a single codebase work well across different browsers, with all their quirks and slight differences in interpretation. I enjoy the thought process of  building apps so that they’ll work when JavaScript isn’t available at all, but take advantage of emerging technologies whenever possible. The constant need for clever workarounds to bridge the gaps between old and new technologies on the web keeps things very interesting.

What does your typical day look like?

Lately at Filament Group, I’ve been going back and forth between client projects, working on jQuery Mobile, and trying to develop techniques that are needed in one or both. Lately, we’ve been working with Ethan Marcotte on a responsive design for a large-scale site, so that’s been a great challenge that has been taking most of my time – look for it to launch this summer!

What do you do in your free time?

I like to disconnect as much as possible outside work. I really enjoy traveling, learning about cooking and brewing beer with my wife, reading, and distance running.

Current favorite apps?

I use the browser on my phone a lot more than I use apps, but lately I’ve been really enjoying the Instagram app. I’ll open the NYTimes app pretty much every day on the subway ride to work. I haven’t really needed it yet, but Word Lens is a pretty incredible app as well.

What OS do you prefer?

Mac & iOS.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I visited the MIT museum last weekend and found the exhibits completely inspiring – particularly the moving machine sculptures. I highly recommend a visit!

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

Probably full-time. I really work best when collaborating with a well-balanced and talented team.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

Releasing jQuery Mobile 1.0 is a big short-term goal. There are a lot of browsers we’re attempting to support, so that’s been quite a challenge. Other than that, I plan to continue improving some of the side projects I’ve been working on to make responsive designs easier to deploy across a broad range of devices, like Respond.js and Responsive Images. I’ll be presenting at some upcoming conferences as well, such as the jQuery Conf in San Francisco.

Who is Misko Hevery?

… works as an Agile Coach at Google where he is responsible for coaching Googlers to maintain the high level of automated testing culture. Previously he worked at Adobe, Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Xerox (to name a few), where he became an expert in building web applications in web related technologies such as Java, JavaScript, Flex and ActionScript. He is very involved in Open Source community and and currently working on the angular project to make it easier for people to build AJAX style web-apps.

Where and when did you start programming?

I started programing when I was about 8 years old. That was around 1984, and back then in Slovakia it was a big deal. I lived in a very small town with about 200 people, and we were the only ones who had a computer. It was Sinclair ZX Spectrum 64K. I first learned BASIC, but then quickly moved on to Pascal and assembler for the Z80. I kept up with the programing languages until I moved to the US, where it became more of a formal education in HighSchool. We had a very good Advanced Placement program, and great teachers which gave us challenging problems to solve. I then attended Rochester Institute of Technology where I got BS/MS in computer engineer, which is actually the hardware side of the computers. But somehow I moved from designing chips to programing firmware, to software and now I do mostly web-applications.

About Angular?

Angular is an Open-Source project which I started with my good friend Adam Abrons. The goal was to enable web-designers (non-programmers) to build simple app like websites, but it quickly became more then that, as it evolved to a web-framework, (but I hesitate to call it a framework, since a better way to think about it is a better browser.) Angular extends the HTML vocabulary with additional elements and attributes which gives you the ability to project your application data in a declarative way to HTML for the user. I like to say that angular is what a browser would have been if it was designed for web apps. Angular really changes the way you think about building web-applications. Main difference is that your application has no DOM manipulation code. All the description of how DOM should be manipulated is specified declarative in HTML. But it is more then that. angular allows you to write your own markup so you can build up vocabulary which makes sense for your application, kind of a DSL. Over time we added depency-injection,  resource management, deep-linking, and lots of other things which are useful when building web-applications. One place where angular is unique is that it has an amazing testability story. A lot of technical decisions have been made to make sure that it will be easy to tests an app built with angular.

Your favorite IDE. Language. JS Framework?

I am an eclipse guy. I have tried to change several times, to InteliJ, but I just can’t get over the key-bindings, rusty SWING UI, and the lack of good way to rearrange the editors in the window. But that is a religious debate, no need to go there.

I started doing Java a while back, so it is by far the language I have written the most code in. I used to be very much into strong typing and I just could not understand those people (ruby mainly) writing apps without type system. Sure you have tests, but you need to have the help of the compiler. Angular is my first JavaScript applications, and it has changed the way I look at JavaScript and on the need or the lack of typing. Typing as the name suggests, is just that, a whole lot of typing. I find JavaScript amazing because it is such a simple language, yet it is so powerful. Yes, I know there are lots of dumb things in JavaScript too, but I can explain JavaScript to you in few hours, where as I need days for Ruby, Java or Python.

My favorite JS framework is angular (if you can call it a framework.) Hey, its my baby, and so I am partial, but jQuery would be the runner up, if angular would be disqualified. But what I am super excited about lately is not a framework at all, but node.js. Node.js is amazing. It changes the way servers are written, and not because it is in JavaScript, but because it is done in non-blocking way, (which JavaScript and the browser popularized). I think Node.js and with it JavaScript will be the next Java.

What does your typical day look like?

I wake up early, usually before 6am. Not my hour, but my 8 month old son, is up and he wants to play. He is so excited to see me at that hour, so I can’t say no. I then car-pool with my wife to work, fortunate for both of us, she works just down street from Google. Google likes Angular so much, that it is my full time job, along with another Googler Igor Minar. Together we try to make angular even better. At lunch I usually go for a couple of mile run. I used to dislike running, but after reading “Born to run” and getting a pair of Five-Fingers, running is actually fun. In the afternoon, is more of angular, and then we head back home where our son is excited to see us.

What do you do in your free time?

Free time is hard to come by, but I enjoy biking and rock-climbing. My wife has a great imagination, so she always comes up with a project around the house. Whether it is installing picket-fence, building an arbor, or digging holes for her garden, she keeps me busy. Turns out some physical work does wonders for your mind. I get some of the best ides when working around the house.

Current favorite apps?

Node.js, Pandora, Groveshark

What OS do you prefer?

Mac OS X: Power of unix with a sexy interface. What more can you ask for.

Small picture for your Workplace?

My workplace is quite simple. Just a desk with monitor, keyboard and mouse, and a place to dock my notebook. I don’t have clutter, as I think fewer things one has the easier it is. Moving is always simple for me. :-)

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I am a passive observer on Twitter, and I tend to follow a lot of people which tweet about technical things, mainly web. It is inspiring too see hove the web, with JavaScript, HTML5 is taking off. So much has happened in just few short years. We went from IE6 being the de-facto standard, to being almost irrelevant, and all thanks to hard work of folks like Mozila FireFox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome. It is almost like peer pressure. Look what the other kids are doing, we better catch up, and IE9 seems to be turning into a decent browser. In the end consumer wins, as web-applications are become more of what the name suggests, application on the web. The area where this is most interesting is Palm Pre, it is basically a phone, where all apps are web-pages. What a clever and inspiring idea.

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

They both have their advantages. Currently I am quite happy with Google, and so I am enjoying the fact that Google is letting me work on my angular project. It is unlikely that angular could gain so much popularity and I would have enough time to get it to the point which it is today.  In the past I have done a lot of freelance work, and there is something exciting about doing work for yourself, but it is a lot of work.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

The goal for 2011 is to spend most of my free time with my son as to give him a good start. He just started crawling so it is quite hard to keep up with him but it is quite exciting. It also turns out that he never turns down Cheerios and blueberry and is motivated enough to crawl through the whole room to get it when he sees it. Turns out that you can use such a reward to get all kinds of interesting data on how he thinks. For example until recently he was very motivated to eat the mirror when he saw Cheerios in it, he knows way better now. He can now take apart two plastic cups to get to his treat in the middle, and he knows that when I point, there must be a treat under it someplace.

Who is Bryan Veloso?

I used to call myself a designer. I don’t know how applicable that is anymore. I’ve also tried to call myself a developer but my current skills say otherwise. I don’t even know if I’m really a Filipino.

What I do know though is that I love to enjoy my days learning, laughing, building and teaching on this boat we call the Internet. At the time of this writing, I’m 27, I work at GitHub, I have a wonderful fianceé of nearly 8 years and I reside in Los Angeles, CA with my 5 satanicadorable cats.

Where and when did you start programming?

It could have been when I started theming WordPress, but I don’t really count that. My love for the cosmic powers that you all humbly refer to as programming started around 4 years ago when a friend of mine, the venerable Jeffrey A. Croft indirectly brought Django to my attention. It was a life changing moment and my career path completely forked away from where it was supposed to go once I started diving in.

You favorite Languages/Frameworks? And why?

Python and Django.

The fact that a friend was working with Django was a huge draw for me and Python was a language I loved stylistically, and as time passed, I found great joy coding in it.

My reasons for picking one language over another could be seen as superficial, and I wouldn’t argue with that. Coming from a background of absolutely no fundamental programming knowledge, choosing a language based on superficial characteristics was all I had to go on. So the reason I disliked Ruby at the time I made that choice was because I hated seeing “end.” Haters gonna hate.

That’s since changed, and the distaste has been replaced with an eagerness to learn (as long as it helps to get me to an end).

What does your typical day look like?

These days, I wake up at about 9:30. I spend some time with my iPhone reading up on the day’s news–through Reeder, Twitter and GitHub–then head to my fortress of distraction to read some more. Then I design and hack, depending on what my scatterbrained head feels like doing. My fiancée joins me–as our desks are next to each other–and the process rinses and repeats with some eating, gaming and pacing until I lose track of time and eventually go to bed.

What do you do in your free time?

Free time seems to come and go depending on how focused I feel at any given moment, but most days when I find a free moment I don’t seem to stray farther than 15 feet from the computer. Most of the time I peer over to see what my fiancée happens to be watching, usually something having to do with J-pop and Japanese idols. When that’s not happening, I hop on an array of consoles and play a good RPG or snipe some heads off in Halo or Call of Duty.

Current favorite apps?

Alfred, Dropbox, 1Password, Propane, Reeder, Twitter for Mac and iPad, GitHub.

What OS do you prefer?

I got my first Mac (a 1st generation Mac mini) through one of those “get free stuff for doing offers that’ll spam you with spammy spam for years to come, making you regret the fact that you ever did this in the first place” offers. Despite all the junk mail–after OS X–I never looked back.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Name something that has inspired you recently?

With design, it’s honestly been hard. There’s so much awesome signal (read: Dribbble) out there that it’s all turning to noise in my head. It’s hard to keep up with and I’ve been finding more discouragement than inspiration lately. I get my best results with my favorite pair of headphones, a song whose lyrics I can’t understand and a pair of closed eyes.

With development, joining GitHub has inspired me tremendously. There are so many hideously smart people working there that my brain can’t take all the awesome that seeps from that company’s pores.

On a more general level, I’ve recently been inspired by the people in our industry with all of their successes coming into the new year–the job moves, the company launches, the small open source project progressions. It’s extremely uplifting and provides me with a drive that no CSS gallery or book can match.

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

Having done both, there are mouth-watering pros and headdesk-inducing cons to each. When I took the job with GitHub, it was the first time in almost 5 years that I welcomely worked for “the man.”

I’m an entrepreneur at heart and being my own boss will always have a place in my heart. I love having control over my own destiny, whether that destiny is being financially stable or financially underground. But over the past couple of years, I grew tired of that. A lot of things happened in between and then GitHub came along. So, we’ll see how this full-time thing goes. It’s been quite a blast so far!

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

I have a few projects that are very close to my heart and that of my fiancée’s. A few of those are still just ideas, but one of them has been in the works for what will be 3 years this March. I hope to have it in public beta by then. Also, I’d love to have a better handle of Ruby (because it sort of runs GitHub) by the end of the year, my distaste with “end”s having subsided.

But more important than any of that, will be getting to and surviving our wedding in August–and I say that with complete pride, excitement and anticipation. It’ll hopefully be an amazing night that’s been an extremely long time coming.

Who is Damien Mathieu?

I’m a french development engineer. I live in Lyon, France and work from home. But I’m not a freelance. I’m working at a startup called oahu.
Actually, I’m not an engineer. But my contract says I am, so …

Where and when did you start programming?

I’ve always been very passionate about computers. We had our first family computer when I was 8.
I don’t remember it. But apparently, after a few hours, I was teaching my mother how to do advanced things in Microsoft Word.

I guess after that I took a break though as I didn’t start programming until 2001, when I was 14 years old. I received, as a birthday present, two ethernet cards for the two family computers.
The goal was for my little brother and me to play together at Age of Empires II.
At that period, we were doing some screenshots of our games. So I thought I would do a web page so we could see it. We didn’t have Internet at the period. So it was only an intranet. But it was my very first HTML page.
3 or 4 months later, I got my first internet connection and, under the influence of very geeky classmates, I started programming in PHP.

You favorite Languages/Frameworks? And why?

Ruby of course !
Back then, it was the beginning of PHP frameworks. And I wasn’t happy with what we could do in “basic” PHP. I wanted more !
And I had heard about this awesome language and the framework which comes with it for the web, Rails.

So I, in 2006, started hacking in my free time in Ruby. I only started doing some professionally one year ago only though.
The funny thing is I started a monthly ruby meetup in my city when ruby was only a hobby for me.

I’m not one of those backend-gourous though. I’m also really interested in frontend development and I really like Coffee Script.
I’m currently really interested by SproutCore and I’m secretly working on a web app which will probably be Open Source once it’s ready to be shown.

What does your typical day look like?

I usually wake up around 7. I don’t have any alarm clock. But I’m seriously thinking of getting one again. I’d like to wake up earlier.
I hack on personal/open source projects until 9am, when I pop up on campfire for work.
Then, I work until midday. During my lunch break, I often go outside to eat with friends, that until around 2pm.
From 2 to 6 or 7, I work again. And in the evening, I either enjoy some quality time with my three roommates or I go out with friends.

What do you do in your free time?

I’m one of the founders of the LyonRB group (http://lyonrb.fr). We organize monthly meetups and an annual RubyCamp.
I’m also the treasurer of an association. It’s a pub which is open every friday evening.
Finally, I go to ski one week-end each to in average (during winter of course). And that’s actually quite a lot !

Current favorite apps?

* Spotify
* Textmate
* Propane
* Chrome
* Appcelerator’s Titanium

What OS do you prefer?

I’m running on a Mac and I really enjoy it.
But If I had to buy a new computer today, it won’t be a mac. I really hate the Apple’s politics from those last two years. I think I’d then go to something simple under ubuntu.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I love looking at Aaron Patterson’s commits in rails. I find it to be the most inspiring source of nice code I could see.

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

I’ve never worked as a freelance and I don’t think I’m ready for it yet.
So I’d say full time employment.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

Get an interview in TheGeekTalk. Hmmm wait, that’s done now so I have to find something else ;-)

I’m having a hard time deciding between either buying my own apartment or moving outside of France (I’m thinking great britain).
That’s quite two opposite things. But I hope I’ll take a decision soon !

Who is Marcus Westin?

A guy who’s passionate about life in general and tries to smile rather than complain. Tweets at @marcuswestin, loves javascript, and codes at Meebo (and you should, too!). Believes that human beings are good at the core, and that this day and age is the best to live in to date because of the capabilities that technology has given the individual to make a change for the better. Is building Fun, a programming language for the realtime web.

Where and when did you start programming?

In High School, with Lego Mindstorms :) You build robots with Legos and motors that are programmed with BASIC. I made a spider that wiggled its legs and climbed up a wire to the ceiling, as well as a walking bug that detected edges on a table and walked around it without falling off. It was a ton of fun!

With my appetite for programming whetted I set out to learn some more. The first thing was using c++ to build a prime number finder (everyone’s gotta do it once, right?). Later in my senior year I got into chaos theory and dabbled with finite automata – I got some really cool graphics made out of it, but never really understood what I was doing. Then I pretty much stopped coding. In college I studied art history and psychology, but finally took a computer science course just to fill up my schedule. That’s when I realized that code was my calling! I’ve always loved building things, but was never really good with “stuff”. Coding lets me build without the hindrances of physical material.

Meebo found my blog during senior year in college and pinged me – at the time I had no idea there was an industry that needed JS hackers! Getting to join up with a small team of super-talented JS engineers was a dream come true. I’ve never been among a more talented group of people – everyone’s super capable, trusting and kind. And did I mention that we’re hiring :)

Why Javascript?

Ease of distribution. You can send someone a link and the user’s click is equivalent to an install in the old world of software.

That’s how it started at least – soon after I fell in love with the functional nature of javascript. In addition, the fact that it’s trivial to get started with (all you need is a browser) and that the learning curve is so smooth (building UI with html and adding dynamic behavior with javascript is such a friendly gateway) really helped.

You favorite IDE. Language. JS Framework?

I write my code in vim and textmate. My favorite languages are javascript, c and fun. I like my javascript in the raw, sans library/frameworks, but there’s really a ton of cool shit being built in js in the past 2 years! I mean, just check out https://github.com/languages/JavaScript!

What does your typical day look like?

It changes all the time – today I got up early, did just a bit of yoga, had tea, and coded for an hour. I figure we’ve got life at work and our life outside of work – I try to live half of my life outside of work in the morning :)

What do you do in your free time?

Procrastinate.

Code, hang out with my best friend/girlfriend, cook, read.

Oh who am I kidding – what free time?

Current favorite apps?

Do people still use apps?

I guess gmail, the meebo bar, thesixtyone… Does github count?

What OS do you prefer?

OS X, hands down

Small picture for your Workplace?

That’s my current setup at our new NYC engineering office – we’re on the top floor of a building at 20th and Park Ave S. We’ve just started hiring NY engineers! Our most recent addition, Alex, started just two days ago. If you’re a hacker in NYC you should so totally come join up – we’re having a ton of fun creating an awesome workspace together :)

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I visited Kenya over the winter break – the African people I met there have so little yet are so generous. They always smile (why shouldn’t we?) and they taught me to enjoy waiting. It’s a valuable lesson that’s very hard to hold on to in NYC.

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

Full time! I really like being around people, and the relationships you get to build while part of a startup are just amazing. In this day and age there is no good reason to work alone.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

Release Fun and see it in the wild.

Who is Paul Dix?

I’m the author of Service Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails, a VP at a financial data startup in NYC called Benchmark Solutions, the organizer of the NYC Machine Learning meetup, and the author of several Ruby gems including Typhoeus and Feedzirra. My programming interests generally fall into one of two categories: infrastructure and scaling, or machine learning. My formal background is in computer science with a specialization in AI, NLP, Search, and Machine Learning.

Where and when did you start programming?

My first start with programming was in 4th grade with a Commodore 64C and Basic. I didn’t do much then, but it was enough to keep me interested for a while. After high school I did more IT stuff then moved into testing a wrote batch and VBScript for automation (Windows tools, I know, but it was for testing Windows 2000). After that I kept with the Microsoft stuff for a while moving into .NET and then finally ditching that for Ruby and open source tools in 2005.

Why Ruby/Rails?

Ruby because it allows me to express ideas, algorithms, and business logic in the least amount of code with the least amount of friction. In 2005 when I was looking around for something other than .NET, I initially looked at Python. I read through Dive into Python and wrote some scripts. After about a month I decided to have a look at Ruby. It took me less than my first session of looking at a book and writing code to realize that it was so much more how I wanted to express ideas than the way Python forced on you. That’s why dynamic languages are great, they don’t force the programmer to write code in a specific way. Python is dynamic, but it still has these weird restrictions.

What does your typical day look like?

Arrive around 9, read email and news quickly. Then do a standup with the team. At that point I’ll either dive into code solo or pair up with someone. I spend probably about 50% pairing and 50% solo. Either way I spend the vast majority of my day actually writing code. Also, for the past month or so I’ve only been working in Scala.

What do you do in your free time?

My free time depends entirely on if I’ve picked up a side project of some sort. When I was writing the book that was pretty much all consuming on my free time. Now I’m taking some time to hang out with friends, enjoy the restaurants of NYC, play in bowling league, and go to meetups around the city (Ruby, Scala, Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics). I’m kicking around a few side projects to start up. Mainly focused around working with machine learning (graphical models and time series analysis in particular).

Current favorite apps?

Chrome, Gmail, Foursquare, Twitter, Pivotal Tracker, Kindle, Quicksilver, Textmate

What OS do you prefer?

Server side it’s Ubuntu, client side it’s OS X.

Small picture for your Workplace?

27″ Apple LED Cinema Display, Mac Pro, two keyboards and mice.

Favorite: Color, Font, Language, JS Framework?

Favorite color? I have no eye for that sort of thing. Maybe if I was cool I’d give a hex value. I suppose some form of blue. Font it easy, Helvetica, duh! Language is Ruby for most things, Scala for some infrastructure, and C for the hard core computations. JQuery for JS, but I don’t get the chance to write JS that often these days.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I’m currently reading Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson. It’s really interesting and I’m getting inspired to start writing again (for my blog) and really digging into probabilistic graphical models.

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

I’ve done both freelance and full time and my preference shifts from time to time. Right now I’d say I have a preference for full time because it allows me to dig deep into a problem space. Freelance is nice when I want to check out different projects.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

For 2011 I’d like to pick back up on writing technical stuff for my blog, spend time studying and working with graphical models, and probably pick up R. I’d like to produce some open source libraries in the machine learning space. I’ve also always wanted to create a port of NumPy and SciPy for Ruby, but I’m not sure if I’m up for that task (unless someone wants to help).

Who is Nathan Weizenbaum?

I’m a coder from Seattle. I recently graduated from the University of Washington with B.A.s in Computer Science and Philosophy; now I’m working at Google Seattle on offline Gmail. I’ve worked on Haml since late 2006 and Sass since it was created in 2007. I’ve been the lead developer for both for most of that time. When I’m not working on Gmail, Haml, or Sass I hack around with various Ruby, Javascript, and Emacs Lisp projects.

Where and when did you start programming?

Other than a little dabbling in programmable graphing calculators, my first real programming was done in the introductory Computer Science course at the university. It was taught in Java, but that summer (at the encouragement of my Software Design and Development instructor) I started checking out the world of open source and stumbled upon Ruby.

Why HAML?

Haml was actually the first open-source project I contributed to. The first summer after I learned to code, I was looking around for open-source projects that I could contribute to, and I saw a post on the Rails mailing list about a new template language. Since it was a very young project, I was able to find some improvements I could make, so I submitted them. That’s how I got started working on Haml.

As to why Haml is a good choice for users, I’ve always believed that it’s an aesthetic decision. Although Haml does make some things easier than ERB (like automatic HTML escaping or embedding other languages like Markdown), either a person or a team likes the compact, whitespace-aware syntax or they don’t. If they do, Haml’s a great choice because it’ll make their HTML easier for them to read, faster for them to write, and closer to the structure of the document. If they don’t like the syntax, though, HTML is a fine (if repetitive) syntax as well.

A more interesting question, I think, is “why Sass?”. Sass started off being an aesthetic improvement over CSS, like Haml is to HTML, but since version 2 or so it’s been much more than that. These days, Sass offers far more than an aesthetic improvement to how CSS is written. It provides the ability to create (and share!) abstractions in CSS, which makes it quadratically more maintainable and readable, as opposed to the linear increase offered by Haml. This is why we introduced the CSS-superset SCSS syntax: because Sass was more than its indented syntax, and we wanted to make that available to everyone.

What does your typical day look like?

During the week, I arrive at work usually some time between 10:30 and 11:30. I spend the day hacking on Gmail or Google Closure. I do my work on Haml and Sass at home in the evening or on weekends. I don’t spend as much time on them as I’d like, but I do work on them one or two days a week. At home and at work I try to keep an eye on the Haml and Sass IRC channels, as well as any StackOverflow questions about them.

What do you do in your free time?

I like to read books, watch movies, and hang out with friends. Every now and then I’ll find a video game that engages me; currently, I’m playing through Kirby’s Epic Yarn. And of course free time is when I work on Haml and Sass.

Current favorite apps?

The apps I use most are without question Emacs, the Awesome window manager, and browsers (I split time about evenly between Firefox and Chrome). Of those, I think Emacs brings me the most joy; there’s just nothing that compares with having a tip-to-tail programmable editor. Awesome is also deeply programmable, and I’m a big fan of the tiling paradigm for windowing.

What OS do you prefer?

Linux. Specifically, I use Ubuntu, although I haven’t tried other distros to a great enough extent to know whether I’d prefer them. I find it unpleasant to do serious work without a tiling window manager and a terminal that can pass my key chords through to Emacs; it feels clunky and slow. The user interface I want is one that lets me do what I want to do as quickly as possible.

I do boot into Windows on my home desktop for games and NetFlix, but I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to.

Small picture for your Workplace?

My workplaces both at home and at work are too messy for me to take a picture without embarrassment, so I’ll try to describe them. Neither is particularly special: a reasonably large monitor, boring keyboard and mouse. I usually have a laptop around in case I need portability (or a build is slowing down my desktop). At work, I have a pile of notebook paper to one side covered with notes I’ve taken to work out a tricky problem or remind myself the next day what I was thinking  about.

Favorite: Color, Font, Language, JS Framework?

My favorite color is definitely blue. I can’t say I pay enough attention to fonts to have a favorite; my aesthetic sense leans in different directions. It’s hard to say what my favorite language is… I’m certainly most proficient in Ruby, but every time I have a chance to use Lisp it brings me great joy. Even the relatively grungy Emacs Lisp is a dream to code in. I keep looking for a project to do in Clojure to see how that feels as well.

For JS frameworks, I’m a big fan of JQuery. It’s both concise and clear, which is a hard balance to strike. That said, at work I’ve been using a lot of Google Closure, and for gigantic projects like Gmail the organizational structure it imposes and the large standard library it offers can be very nice.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I’m pretty inspired by the success of CoffeeScript. I think it shows that there’s a growing appetite out there for languages in the vein of Haml and Sass that add syntax and features to existing languages, while maintaining relatively direct semantic parity. I’d love to see this sort of thing become more prominent and widely-used.

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

Currently, I’m quite happy with my full-time job. I get to be around lots of smart people and work with code that astounding numbers of people use every day. I think if I weren’t working at Google, I’d probably want to spend the majority of my time on Haml and Sass.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

I want to make Sass more accessible to designers. Ultimately, I want it to be usable without ever touching the command line. There are also numerous improvements I want to make to the language. I’m hoping for two major releases in 2011.

I’m also working on a package server for Emacs Lisp, and I’d love to see that catch on.

Who is Corey Donohoe?

Some dude who happens like to programming.  I work at GitHub, an amazing website dedicated to software collaboration.  I love disruptive and irreverent things.

One of my friends in SF described me to his wife as a grown up skater punk.

Where and when did you start programming?

I learned to program about 10 years ago.  After high school I bummed around southern California for a while and ended up studying chess.  I eventually realized that being a bum wasn’t gonna give me the flexibility I wanted in my life so I moved in with my parents in Memphis Tennessee to go to university.

Most of my friends were back in California so I got a computer to keep in touch with them.  Shortly after that I tore all the ligaments off of my right ankle and spent 3 months in a walking cast.  During that time I spent all day every day talking to friends and trying to find new music online.  Discovering new music ultimately led me to dig into Linux and open source software.  I idolized the people building the enlightenment window manager at the time and wanted to be a part of it.  I ended up spending a lot of time hacking X11 and enlightenment stuff during university.  Hacking on open source was a great complement to a formal CS degree.

Why Ruby/Rails?

I chose ruby a few years ago because of the simplicity of it all.  I learned C++/Java in university but wasn’t ever a big fan, I actually preferred straight up C over those languages.  Ruby worked well with the way I modeled objects in my brain at the time so I started using it everywhere.  I found the barrier to collaboration much lower than other languages and it worked well as a perl replacement in the hybrid deployment/operations role I was in at the time.

I chose rails for the community, at least what it was 4-5 years ago.  The majority of the people who were into rails early on were mind-blowingly creative. These days it’s matured and has gained acceptance, and with that comes structure and people building things for the masses instead of building things that are simple and do one thing well.  I still think there’s an insane amount of creativity/awesomeness in the ruby community I just think those people get drowned out because it’s so large.  I think the same kind of energy that existed in the ruby community a few years ago is visible in what has built up around node.js.

What does your typical day look like?

Crawl outta bed around 9-10 am, feed my two dogs.  Check campfire/twitter/email for bug reports/gripes from customers.  Make an americano.  Pick up on whatever I left off the day before for GitHub. 2-3 days a week I go into the office to see my coworkers. Hopefully ship fixes/enhancements. Make an animated gif or two.  Grab a tasty IPA or maybe some bourbon. Rinse & Repeat for M-F, hopefully get outta the city on the weekend.

What do you do in your free time?

I’ve been slowly learning how to surf over the past year.  I really enjoy cycling around SF, biking across the Golden Gate bridge or out to the ocean makes for an amazing Saturday.  I also enjoy riding in the trees at Heavenly on my snowboard in the winter.  I’m a huge fan of live music and art.  I’m kind of a sucker for a shitty movie marathon too.

Current favorite apps?

GitHub, Chrome, Skitch, Echofon, 1password, Propane, Limechat, Adium, Mailplane, iTerm, PDFPen, uTorrent, Tunnelblick, MacVIM, Cinderella.

What OS do you prefer?

OSX for my laptop, Linux for remote machines.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Favorite: Color, Font, Language, JS Framework?

• Favorite Color: Red
• Favorite Font: Comic Sans
• Language: Ruby
• JS Framework: jQuery for client side stuff, node for server side.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

Basically everything Aaaron Patterson has been doing.  His talks and software keep getting better and better.  He’s appears to balance playfulness and technical expertise really well.

I’ve also be really excited by “If we don’t, remember me” a tumblr account that makes animated gifs out of classic movies.  I couldn’t help but wonder how they made them and what made them choose certain scenes.

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

I prefer full time employment.  I had a paper route for about 5 years when I was a teenager and the one thing I loathed was collecting.  I hate pursuing money but I love when people are willing give it to me at regular intervals. ;) When I’m into a project I think about it all the time, it’s hard to give an hourly rate for something I’m constantly thinking about.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

I’d like to move my Cinderella project away from chef for bootstrapping and distribute it as a ready to go .dmg file, then use chef to maintain the installation.  I’d like to continue releasing bits of GitHub infrastructure as open source projects as well.  I have a few other smaller open source projects I’d like to keep functional: hancock, scroauth, ciderapp.org and others.  I like to keep a few simple things around as examples for myself and others.

I really want to get more and more people on GitHub as well.  I’m hoping that attending a few conferences will help me get to know more of our customers.  Ienjoy the fact that my job overlaps with my personal projects quite a bit. :)

I’d also like to learn another language or two.