Who is Irina Dumitrascu?

I am a geek girl from Romania; I like to program, travel and walk on mountains. In the last year and a half I was lucky to do all of them while visiting South America together with my boyfriend, [Cristi], as semi-nomad freelancers.

I am shy, deliberative, and intellectual. If I commit to something I will push with all my energy to get it done.

Where and when did you start programming?

I went to a computer science highschool, and I had a great teacher who taught me about algorythms and smart programming techniques. I got really passioned with programming when I was 17, to the point of spending some good hours each day improving my problem solving skills and learning sophisticated algorythms. This was not so good for my social life, but got me among the smartest geeks in the country (top 6% in national olympics, to be exact).

I continued programming through university, started to do web development and wrote some more or less atrocious PHP and some decent multithreaded backend Java. I also worked with Adobe Romania on web related projects and finally started freelancing with Ruby and Rails around 2008.

Why Ruby?

I switched to Ruby charmed by how easy it was to test your code and by the elegant syntax. First, I tried it for a personal project: scraping some information of a web site and saving it in a DB. It was ready in no time, as a mix of Nokogiri, DataMapper and less than 40 lines of code. The next day I started [vimmish], a parser for vim commands. Quickly after, I moved to Ruby for all my web development and glue code.

You favorite IDE. JS Framework?

I use MacVim with some plugins for opening files, commenting code and a mostly stolen .vimrc (because I hate fiddling).

On the JS front, I love Backbone. It is light and powerful, and it makes writing and maintaining JS a pleasure. And it’s even better when adding Coffeescript to the mixture.

What does your typical day look like?

When I am freelancing: I try to get up at a decent hour and get a good chunk of work done in the morning. After lunch I read something or sleep a bit before the second round. Around 7 it’s time to browse for something nice to cook, and 9 o’clock will catch me watching a movie, reading something or drinking a beer with friends. Also, a typical day has a 28.6% chance of including a dancing lesson.

When I am traveling: wake up, if in a tent – enjoy the nature, otherwise – visit the current city, eat some streetfood, maybe hop on the next bus, search for a cool [couchsurfing] host or a nice hostel.

What do you do in your free time?

Program, cook, dance, read, go out, trek.

Current favorite apps?

Picasa. I used to love Skitch. Dropbox is useful.

What OS do you prefer?

Mac OS X. It works well and looks good.

Small picture for your Workplace?

This is me and my flamboyant working place in Sucre, Bolivia. I am addicted to having paper around when I work, to write down tasks, ideas or just things to remember.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

While working with Cristi on [Tzigla], our collaborative drawing web application, it was amazing to see people using the site to create very beautiful works of art. It was also inspiring to see how fast we were able to launch the core functionality (40 hours), and how our struggles with the design finally led to a decent UI.

I learned to draw from the book [Drawing on the right side of the brain]. I have always thought drawing is tied to talent, and it was great to find that it can be learned, it is quite easy, and it feels very good. You should try it.

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

As I love to travel and to live in different places, I greatly enjoy the flexibility that freelancing offers. What I miss sometimes from my employed life is having a lot of smart people around, and discussing interesting technical issues over lunch.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

Go to one more Ruby or JS conference. Start a new significant personal project. Code more awesome features for [Tzigla]
Spend some weekends outdoors, in the beautiful mountains of Romania. Take on dancing classes again. Live in two different cities.

Who is Jack Danger Canty?

Jack is an overprivileged urban male in Seattle who writes code and loves personal growth of all kinds. Danger is his middle name.

Where and when did you start programming?

I bought a book on ASP 4.0 and was amazed by how, in only 50-100 lines of code, I could perform simple commands. In only a few hundred lines more I could output html that was bad even by 1999 standards. I figured ASP 4 was the future of programming so it was worth learning. I may have chosen poorly. Like that guy who’s face melts at the end of the last Indiana Jones movie. Remember that? That was awesome.

You favorite Languages/Frameworks? And why?

I’ve been working full time with Rails since before version 0.9.6. I love it like it’s family and, like family, I’m trying to get some ‘me time’ away from it. So I’m spending nights and weekends with Javascript. What’s got me most excited lately is the combination of Node.js and Riak. It’s like a fresh, new family where I haven’t heard all the jokes and nobody’s going to make me the godparent of their ugly baby.
Riak has the best of Erlang and has a really interesting approach to scaling and storage (i.e. you can store anything and scaling is free).
And I like Node.js because Steve Yegge told me Javascript was gonna be huge and because Node moves even faster than the spread of bad advice on Hacker News.

What does your typical day look like?

I get up early and run two miles to the local CrossFit gym. After working out I run two miles back home and shower. Then I, like, save babies from burning buildings and cure cancer.
I have a policy to not open my computer until I’m out of the house and set up for the day at a cafe. Once I have a macchiato, a macbook pro, and my iphone sitting on a table at a local coffee shop I try to ignore how douchy that all looks and get some work done.
I break for dinner around 5:30 and try to spend some time with my better half. Then, if there isn’t some place I unquestionably, absolutely have to be (like happy hour or browsing facebook) I hang out on the couch working some more.
On Sundays I have a strict no-computer policy. My wife and I go out to breakfast, we come home, and I do shit-all until it’s bedtime. Sunday is my favorite.

What do you do in your free time?

I’m deeply interested in feminism and feminist theology. I recently published a re-translation of the bible where every gendered pronoun and name was swapped; male for female, female for male. It’s an illustration of the profound silence of women in the bible. I’ve long since stopped believing in the supernatural but I’m still banging around inside Christianity causing trouble.
I also love to learn new languages, both natural and computer. My degree is in Linguistics and I have a talent for quickly learning enough of a foreign tongue to be totally unintelligible in it. I’m practicing my Italian by having my phone, Gmail, and Facebook accounts all set to Italian. If I ever travel there I’ll be an expert at prompting waiters to ‘return to inbox’ or ‘select a file’.

Current favorite apps?

Thanks to the Kindle app I’m able to devour more bad sci-fi novels than I ever dreamed. Just yesterday I read a whole book about nanite-infested soldiers or some shit that totally saved the world from aliens. It’s my own personal library of awful man-fiction and no app could make me happier.

What OS do you prefer?

The command line. Somewhere behind my terminal is OS X but I think I need a mouse to use most of that crap.

Small picture for your Workplace?

This is my wife posing in my work-hammock. Weather permitting, I bike around Seattle finding places to set up my swinging mesh laboratory. You can get a surprising amount of code written while in a hammock. Bonus: everybody in the world envies you.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I saw the 50-year-old founder of my CrossFit gym doing clapping pull-ups. Also, I saw my buddy @carlosdavis run a 5:37 mile. I used to be a slow fat guy and now I’m inspired by anybody who treats their body right.

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

Founding companies. With the minimum necessary effort I want to make new products that cause people to scream with pleasure.
Total pleasure-screams to date: zero. But, still, that’s the goal.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

The official list:
- Do 10 handstand pushups.
- have my bible retranslation denounced by at least one narcissist, male, heteronormative church pastor.
- Have $5 million in sales through http://cloops.com
- launch my side-project
- leave the country at least once

Who Jose Ignacio Costa?

I’m a Software Engineer from Montevideo, Uruguay, and Co-Founder of WyeWorks where I office as senior developer, consultant and manager.

Where and when did you start programming?

I started messing around with web pages right before getting into college to get my Computer Science degree. So I did then some basic HTML and CSS before I started really learning how to program using several languages such as Pascal, C, C++, Java and others.

Why Ruby/Rails?

Personally because it’s fun, elegant, but still very serious.  I also feel the community around it is great in many ways. I had the pleasure to hang out with many capable and cool people that are passionate about seeking better and faster solutions to everyday problems.
From a business perspective it’s also very important that we are at the point that we can build maintainable, high quality applications very fast, so overall it’s a great combo.

You favorite IDE?

Might be somewhere between Emacs and vim. I’m currently happy using vim, but I had my happy days with Emacs too.

What does your typical day look like?

Usually I start at home going through all email and Twitter to get an idea of how my day will look like and mark stuff that I want to check out through the day.

When I get to the office I try to talk with the other guys to see if I can be of any help (when I have enough time) in their projects or if they need anything from me, and then I tackle my share of administrative/operational task we split with my partner Santiago Pastorino.

After that I’m ready to become a whatever-time-is-left-to-leave programmer. Neadless to say, all these is rarely so linearly organized.

What do you do in your free time?

I like to work out regularly so I don’t consider that free time. So in my real free time I enjoy watching soccer and movies, cooking or going out for dinner and drinks, playing the guitar and a good asado with achuras (traditional barbecue) with my friends.

Current favorite apps?

I’ll tell you what I use on a regular basis and maybe that makes them my favorite apps :) Github and Pivotal Tracker on the web, and on my iPhone, Echofon and Read it Later.

What OS do you prefer?

I’ve been using Linux for quite some time, in particular I’ve sticked to Ubuntu since 6.04. So I’m used to that. But I’ll give OS X a shot sometime this year.

Small picture for your Workplace?

We just moved to our new office! Still not equipped, so this is how it looks right now:

Name something that has inspired you recently?

In general, I’m inspired by people that dare to question themselves if they are really happy with what they are doing, and do whatever they need to change it if they are not.

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

Done both, mixed them together and we now have WyeWorks. I have a full time position but I’m also one of the responsibles for the company to be stable, contact clients, make sure work gets done, make sure we get paid … so I  think I’m somewhere in the middle and I like that.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

I would like to see me and my co-workers grow professionaly and personally, and contribute in any way I can to that and to keep making WyeWorks a nicer place to be around and that everyone can enjoy their jobs.
I would also love to contribute more actively to open source and to Rails, and at the same time have a blast in my free time traveling more and hanging out with my friends, family and the cool people I meet every now and then.

Who is Zack Hobson?

I am a professional software developer, originally from Los Angeles. I’ve been working in database-backed web applications for most of my career, which has been going on for about 15 years (including a 3-year break after the 2000 tech bubble burst). My current employer ENTP is responsible for the products Lighthouse and Tender, both of which I use every day to do my job. My associates know me as a passionate arguer with many strong opinions. In my defense, I am also known for turning on a dime when new information warrants a change in position.Currently I reside in Portland, Oregon, a relatively small city which is well-suited my lifestyle of drinking microbrewery beer and perambulating. I gave up driving years ago, as I am too easily distracted to do so safely. Like most of my generation I am a life-long fan of Star Wars, although in order to maintain this I have to ignore everything George Lucas has done since 1990.

I love producing software, finding a fault, developing it and making it run smoothly. I am one of those people who like to see a challenge and embrace it. People who enjoy similar tactical and thinking challenges like chess and casino games like Partypoker, may also enjoy software engineering because it requires an element of logic, thinking and solving a puzzle. My colleges would also describe me as driven and determined to finish what I begin.

Where and when did you start programming?

My first non-trivial program was a data munging project written in Perl 4. I was just out of high school doing junior sysadmin/support for my local ISP at the time. We had this huge rack of USR modems hooked up to several “portmaster” serial port multipliers that logged each connect and disconnect. My task was to aggregate this massive set of individual login and logout records, producing a single line-item for each session. I learned by reading the llama book and asking questions of the lead sysadmin when I was stuck. It took the program several hours to run due to the sheer amount of data involved, and it worked correctly the first time we ran it on the complete set. This was an addictive experience for me and I wanted more, so I started learning how to write CGI programs using Apache and Perl. This gave way to mod_perl and eventually (about… 4 years ago I think) Ruby on Rails.

Why Ruby or Python? And why?

Ruby is a great language, although far from perfect. Because I came up using Perl, I am comfortable with a certain amount of conceptual messiness if it helps get things done. Python appeals to the part of me that prizes orthogonality and consistency, and it’s not hard to understand why it’s such a popular language. I’ve written non-trivial programs in both languages, but I am much stronger in Ruby than Python. I do find the “domain-specific language” (properly, “internal DSL”) culture in Ruby to be a bit tiring, as I think it focuses too much on creating pretty code examples without considering the impact on flow control. Not to mention that you can use the word “API” instead of “DSL” and lose nothing. Honestly my truly favorite language is still C because it makes me feel close to the computer, but I can count the number of times I’ve used C professionally on one hand.

As for why, that’s more a function of the work I was being asked to do. Since Perl was the de-facto web dev language early on, it was an easy choice at the time. I started doing Ruby professionally when I was hired by Geni, where I built the messaging and timeline/event stuff using Ruby and Rails. Also, in addition to  being a fun language, Ruby was heavily influenced by Perl early on, and there are some similarities in the culture. At ENTP I joined the ranks of some well-known names in the Rails community, which has cemented my relationship with Ruby even further.

You favorite IDE?

I work primarily in MacVim and a Terminal window. I don’t use an IDE unless I am working from someone else’s project file (e.g. with Xcode projects or similar), and even then I still use Vim for source editing. This seems to be a popular choice among those of us who’ve been doing this for as long as I have. I don’t think of myself as being old fashioned, but it does comfort me to see younger developers who have independently reached similar conclusions with regards to their toolset.

Speaking for myself, the primary reason I use Vim is for modal editing, a feature that for whatever reason has not caught on in other (non-vi-based) editors. If I could easily use Vi-style modal editing in Textmate it’s possible I’d switch. I did try using GNU Emacs in this way since it has a stellar extension system (compared to Vim), but it didn’t really work out. I also have an unfounded theory that modal editing might help reduce the likelihood of repetitive stress injuries. Richard Stallman has horrendous RSI, and I have long suspected Emacs itself might be partly to blame.

JS Framework?

I don’t have strong opinions on any JS framework, but like most people I use JQuery for DOM manipulation and async browser stuff when needed. Honestly most of the time there are specialized front-end guys writing the JS for me, and all I have to worry about is the backend. I’m proud to say that I’ve worked with some of the sharpest front-end devs in the business, but this is both a blessing and a curse as it means my skills lean ever more strongly toward the server side. Like most of my peers I’ve dabbled in Node.js, but frankly I find Javascript’s syntax a bit tiresome and am hoping something like CoffeeScript will eventually become more common (and easier to debug). Most (but not all) of the cool stuff about Node has little to do with Javascript itself, but rather the fact that the IO and related APIs are asynchronous from the ground up. Having said that, I do like Javascript’s object model and hope that other languages learn from it.

What does your typical day look like?

I wake without an alarm and ping at least one of my co-workers for breakfast. After that we hit the office for a few hours until the afternoon, when we often retire to the local coffee shop for the rest of the day and drink insanely strong pour-over coffee. Sometimes I have more than one, and end up having to take a break because I am vibrating out of my chair. During all of this time I am hacking, researching and occasionally doing customer support. The evening is usually spent playing video games or socializing at the local brewpub.

What do you do in your free time?

To be honest, I have been playing lots of console video games. Like many software developers, I used to fantasize about making video games when I was young, but now I just consider myself a connoisseur of great gaming experiences. The majority of mainstream video games are genuinely terrible in my opinion, but the good ones make it worth digging through the rest. Very recently I’ve gotten into an online space simulator called EVE Online, which has effectively subsumed my console gaming habit.

My hacking activities outside of work are mostly one-off things where I am scratching my own itch. The only moderately popular open source tool that I maintain is the HCl command-line client for the Harvest time tracker. My GitHub profile is full of repos that I forked just so that I could push a single patch.

Current favorite apps?

Currently, Reeder for iPad and Mac OS. Not even sure which one I like better, although I use the Mac OS version more often. MacVim is currently the reigning Vi-workalike on the Mac and it’s even adding features (most recently: fullscreen mode)!

What OS do you prefer?

Mac OS X. It’s a true UNIX with a fantastic UI and development environment. Before Apple started making the best UNIX workstations, I used Debian/Ubuntu and FreeBSD on commodity PCs that I built myself.
Now I have a MacBook Air as my primary and love it to death. I doubt I’ll ever go back to an open source OS, mostly due to emotional scarring caused by trying to get video drivers to work properly.

While I have the floor I’d also like to mention that “Mac OS X” is pronounced “Mac Oss Ten,” not “Mac Oss Ex.” That’s a personal pet peeve of mine, so I thought I’d try to spread the word.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Hm, not much to it. Just my 13-inch MacBook Air and maybe an extra monitor, although recently I haven’t even been using the monitor. I used to swear by my Happy Hacking USB keyboard and Logitech bluetooth mouse, but lately I find it about as easy to use the built-in keyboard and touchpad on my laptop.

Credit: Will Duncan.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I just read a great book, “Being Geek” by Michael Lopp (published by O’Reilly). Tons of good advice about embracing inevitable randomness and being honest with yourself. I am historically okay at the latter but the former was a bit of a revelation to me.

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

Personally I have always been more comfortable working for someone else, as I am inherently risk-averse. There are times when this can feel restrictive, but I have never been a one-man band, and I’m used to depending on others (designers, testers, sysops) to get my work into the larger world. Validation, structure, consistency are all things I like about “working for the Man,” as I often put it.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

Engaging with other developers outside of work is a big one. There is no shortage of technical meet-ups in my local area of Portland, OR, but I am not a frequent sight at these events (except for the GitHub drinkups, of course).

Who is Erik Michaels-Ober?

I’m a software developer and entrepreneur living in San Francisco. You may know me as sferik on IRC, GitHub, or Twitter. I’m currently a Fellow at Code for America. I also hack on a number of open-source software projects, including RailsAdmin, Thor, Faraday, MultiXML, Octokit, the Twitter gem and the recently-kickstarted Hubcap project.

Where and when did you start programming?

My first exposure to code was at the age of eight, running NIBBLES.BAS and GORILLA.BAS in a QBasic interpreter. After getting bored playing these games, I figured out I could make changes to them by editing the source code. I still remember the magical feeling I got after changing a line of text and seeing it affect the gameplay. At some point, I made so many changes that the games no longer worked, so I found a book on BASIC and learned enough to get them working again and create a few simple games of my own.

Why Ruby/Rails?

I used the internet for the first time in 1995 and decided that web stuff was more interesting than BASIC programs. I taught myself HTML, mostly by viewing the source of other web pages, but what I really wanted was the same kind of programatic control I had in BASIC, so I started fiddling around with CGI scripts in Perl. Compared to BASIC, I really liked Perl. When CPAN came online in late 1995, it was probably my favorite site on the web.

Through high school and college, I learned a number of other programming languages, but after college I moved to San Francisco and returned to doing web development in Perl. In 2005, I heard about Rails and discovered Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby. Ruby had all of the things things I liked about Perl but with nicer syntax and more conceptual consistency. When GitHub launched in 2008, it quickly became to Ruby was CPAN was for Perl and I’m happy to say I haven’t written very much Perl code since.

Recently, I’ve been teaching myself MacRuby, which I really enjoy. After writing scripts and web apps for years, there’s something deeply satisfying about building native applications, with their own icon and window chrome. Mac OS X has a lot of APIs for which there’s still no equivalent on the web. And having the ability to call these APIs using Ruby is a beautiful thing.

What’s your favorite IDE?

I write most of my code in vim, but I recently started using Xcode for MacRuby development. Also, the TextMate 2 private alpha release is really nice. ;)

What does your typical day look like?

I can’t say that I have many “typical” days. My morning routine starts with checking email and reviewing pull requests that arrived overnight. I then bike over to the Code for America offices in downtown San Francisco. What I do from there varies a lot from day to day. Being a Code for America Fellow is like nothing else I’ve ever done. On average, I only spend about 4 hours per day actually writing code. The rest of my time is spent working with leaders in technology and government to make cities more efficient, open, and responsive to citizens.

What do you do in your free time?

I spend a lot of my free time writing code and learning about new ideas in computer science. I also like biking, hiking, picnicking, skiing, cooking, and playing poker.

Current favorite apps?

I recently switched to the Textual IRC client, after using Colloquy for a number of years. I think it’s going to stick.

What OS do you prefer?

Mac OS X.

Small picture of your Workplace?

Code for America operates out of the former MOTO Development Group headquarters in downtown San Francisco, generously donated by Cisco after they absorbed MOTO in 2010.

credit: Adriel Hampton.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I was inspired by a recent talk by Tim O’Reilly on Government as a Platform, tracing the history of the web as he saw it emerge and thinking about how the web could work in the future to solve some of the problems of today.

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

When I’m working on something, I like to give it 100 percent of my attention, which tends to be more conducive to full-time projects than freelancing.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

I’m planning to release Hubcap, a social GitHub client for Mac OS X, later this year.

Who is Giles Bowkett?

Giles Bowkett is a thriving programmer, a struggling actor, a prolific blogger, a once and future information marketer, and a former DJ whose vinyl records simply did not sell, at all. He’s writing a book on how to create algorithmic music with Ruby. He expects it to sell, because people have been telling him they expect to buy it.

Where and when did you start programming?

I first started programming at 11 years old, in a computer class, writing BASIC on a TRS-80. Then I stopped and didn’t give it another thought until I was 17. We had graphing calculators; I programmed mine in BASIC to do Feigenbaum sequences, chaos math analogous to slices of the Mandelbrot set, and hit the memory limits of the calculator quite quickly. Then at 18 I did a summer job cleaning air conditioners at a local university. The job had a lot of downtime, so I borrowed a friend’s book on Pascal and taught myself the language with a paper notebook and no computer, not because I was planning to do anything useful with it, just because I was bored and needed a mental challenge. Then when I was 20, I was working as an office temp and writing screenplays, and I got into doing production art for graphic design firms, Photoshop, Illustrator, stuff like that, and they needed people who knew HTML. I taught myself HTML, moved to San Francisco, got into the dot-com boom, learned Perl, and became a programmer.

You favorite Languages/Frameworks? And why?

Ruby and Rails, for the combination of beauty and practicality. Smalltalk and Scheme, because I’m a classicist.

What does your typical day look like?

Difficult to answer because my life changes unpredictably and constantly. Currently a typical day is a 9 to 5 in an office. Six months ago I was creating my own products and selling them, so I was working from home, and a typical day began with cooking breakfast, working out by climbing steep hillside steps (I live in a very hilly neighborhood of Los Angeles which actually contains the three steepest paved roads in the United States), and putting myself in a hypnotic trance for half an hour for the relaxation and health benefits. Six months before that I was doing a 9 to 5 where I was absurdly underpaid, but I was building a web app for a Hollywood production company, and I got to learn quite a bit about the entertainment industry in the process. Six months before that, I was consulting, so again, getting up when I felt like it, working out, hacking at cafés.

What do you do in your free time?

I don’t really have a lot of free time in any rational sense, because if I’m not writing code for money, or working on my acting career, or working on my information marketing businesses, or my startup (a business based on automated refactoring, which I have a proof-of-concept for, but which will probably take years before it works in any truly serious sense), or my music, then I’m probably either fucking or asleep.

Current favorite apps?

iPod: Awesome Note, Epic Win, iThoughts, Impossible Game, Sentinel 3 (video game).
Drop7. It’s this awesome iPhone/iPod game. I got completely hooked on it, wrote a Ruby clone, and got to the number one spot on its daily leaderboards twice.

What OS do you prefer?

I could not give less of a shit about operating systems. Life is too fucking short.

Small picture for your Workplace

Well, here’s where I’m working

But I tend to job-hop quite a bit, which means that might not even be where I’m at by the time you post this, so just in case, here’s one of my setups at home

They’re both standup desks done in a rather hurried and ghetto fashion. I also tend to do a lot of laptop hacking at cafés, on my sofa, on my bed, and sometimes even outside, if I can find enough shade. I have a cozy little porch, for instance, which is pretty great when the light isn’t overwhelming.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

The other night, my acting class was absolutely fucking amazing. If you offered me Mark Zuckerberg’s billions, and all I had to give up was the six hours of that acting class, I would keep those six hours and say fuck the billions. Not even kidding. It’s just awe-inspiring the committment, passion, and relentless courage that great actors bring to their work. I have no fucking idea how in the hell I managed to get into a class this good. I feel like the luckiest man on earth.

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

Freelance work is better, hands down, but I think that’s actually a very dangerous false dichotomy. I prefer working for myself, by an overwhelming margin. If you don’t own the things you create, you’re trading money for time, which is the stupidest thing in the world. If you run out of money, you can make more money. If you run out of time, you’re dead. Everybody runs out of time sooner or later, but the world is constantly generating more and more money than ever before. Trading away a precious, limited resource for an abundant, readily available one is just stupid beyond words.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

My priority in 2011 is my acting career. I have to pay my dues: casting workshops, auditions, and background work. It’s going to be a lot of work. I’m also writing a book about creating algorithmic music with Ruby. It’s going to be awesome, and the kick in the pants I need to add some long-overdue features to Archaeopteryx, my Ruby AI dance music generator. I’m also working on an automated refactoring system, which as I mentioned seems to be taking forever to write. So far it can identify similar code in Ruby and JavaScript and generate wrapper functions in JavaScript. It’s teaching me some interesting things about parsers and graph theory but I really wish it was going faster. I’ve also created a new blog called “Robot Warriors Will Destroy America,” which is kind of an apocalyptic cyberpunk thing. It’s very much in its infancy now, but my goal is to take on topics like the dangerous potential of robots as a weapon of terrorism, and highlight possible solutions. I think it’s important for geeks to think seriously about these things. Technological literacy confers a significant amount of power today, and with great power comes great responsibility.

Who is Marcin Bunsch?

A geek with an open mind who’s greatest passion is coding. I’m a new tech junkie and I’ve made a career out of it. I’m the R&D Manager at FutureSimple, the company behind Pipejump and Quotebase.

Where and when did you start programming?

The interesting part of this story is that I come from a non-technical background – I have a BA and MA in journalism and a MA in political science.
I was drawn to programming in high school, where we had PASCAL classes, but never thought of myself as a tech person.

I came back to programming at the University when we had web design classes. I liked it so much that I covered the whole semester in 2 weeks. From then I went into being a freelance PHP-based web developer.

Why Ruby/Rails?

After 2 years of working with PHP, I wanted to learn more about software development. At that time I joined Applicake, which meant switching to Ruby. I’m always up for trying new tech, but this rocked my world. I was stunned by the elegance that Ruby provides. After all these years, it still surprises me how much fun it is to work with.

Rails is my weapon of choice when it comes to more complex apps, although for smaller projects I really like the concise style of Sinatra.

You favorite IDE. JS Framework?

Editor: I don’t like complex IDEs. I’m a huge fan of Textmate. It’s really easy to start with and packs one hell of a punch the longer you use it.

JS: jQuery – it’s fun!

What does your typical day look like?

It starts with walking my dog. I then go to the office, have breakfast while reading through emails and articles. The rest of the day is usually spent on coding, consulting and meetings. In the evenings I either hang out with my wife and friends or code for fun (personal projects, programming challenges, new libs, depends on the day ;) )

What do you do in your free time?

I spend free time with my wife, either cooking, talking, watching TV shows or playing with our cat and dog. I also like experimenting with coding and new tech, which means I tend to spend free time in front of the computer ;) When I finally leave the computer I occasionally like to play football.

Current favorite apps?

Chrome, Textmate, Things, Mailplane, 1password, Gabble, Netnewswire

What OS do you prefer?

I try not to be fanatic about it, but Mac OS. It helps me getting the job done instead of getting in my way (yeah, Windows, I’m looking at you).

Small picture for your Workplace?

Name something that has inspired you recently?

It changes so fast it’s really hard to say. I try to keep up with the changing world of web technologies, which means I find inspiration every day in reading about all of the great ideas that people have. So in a way it’s the contents of my RSS reader.

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

Full time employment. Mostly because for me it means having a real office. I like the separation of the office life and personal life. When I worked as a Freelancer I could work whenever, which meant working all the time.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

I don’t want to jinx them so I won’t tell ;)

One goal I will reveal is to read more books. Reading stuff online is great, but it’s much more enriching to spend time with a good book and focus on it. Plus it lets me rest from the screen, so it’s a win-win situation.

Who is James Edward Gray?

My dad.  That and the fact that James Gray is a super common name are the main reasons you usually see me go by my full name:  James Edward Gray II.

As for who I am, I’m just a programmer.  I don’t think of myself as much more involved than a lot of other programmers I know, so it always surprises me when people want an interview.

Where and when did you start programming?

My parents gave me a Colecovision Adam (an early computer) when I was 13.  It didn’t do to much, but it came with a 1,000 page manual for programming Basic.  I read that book over and over again, teaching myself to program.  To be honest though, I understood very little of it at the time.  I drew pretty pictures with it line by line and pixel by pixel, plus wrote some super simple games.

By the time I reached high school, we had to have a graphing calculator.  Again I read the manual that came with my TI-86 to learn its flavor of Basic.  I built a graphical Blackjack game with it that used nearly all of its memory (likely due to bad programming on my part) and shared it with pretty much the whole school (it had an I/O port that could take a “link” cable).  That got me in trouble with most of the math teachers as students spent too much time playing games instead of doing math.

Luckily for me though, one of those math teachers taught a Pascal class.  He convinced me I needed to take it and it was all downhill from there.

You favorite Languages/Frameworks? And why?

Ruby is my main passion, though I dabble in other languages at times.  I build Web application with Ruby on Rails as a day job.

They remain my favorites, because I feel like they help me get what is in my brain into a workable form better than anything else I’ve used so far.

What does your typical day look like?

Lately, I don’t feel like I have too many typical days.  Having a new daughter makes that trickier.

Mostly though, I cross the hall from my bedroom to my office and build Web applications for the majority of the day.  I try to sneak in some playtime with the baby when I can.

What do you do in your free time?

Ruby is my favorite toy.  I still can’t believe I make money playing with it.  So, for some part of most days, I build software for money.  For the rest of the day, I usually just leave off the “for money” part.

I’m also terrible at managing free time.  As I get more of it, I just commit myself to more things.  Eventually I feel pretty overwhelmed and stop renewing commitments.  That gives me more free time, so the cycle starts over from there.

I’m just not happy unless I’m spending a huge chunk of time programming or doing something else for the programming community.

Current favorite apps?

Most of my recent playing with applications has been on the iPad, a gift from my sweet wife this Christmas.  I’ve been playing games on it, like Drawn, and learning new ways to communicate with my computer using it, like Instapaper.

What OS do you prefer?

I use Mac OS X all day every day.  I was on Macs even before OS X, but having Unix under the hood makes it even better, in my opinion.

I use Linux for servers like most everybody else.  Ubuntu is probably my favorite flavor.

I did some Windows programming very briefly and just didn’t like that at all.  I’m glad some do, but it’s not for me.

Recently, I also enjoy playing around in iOS.  It seems relaxing to have to manage so much less.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Here is my desk with the two most important work tools on it, my laptop for the programming and the baby for distractions:

Name something that has inspired you recently?

My wife and daughter inspire me every single day and then tolerate all the time I spend away from them working on crazy schemes.  My girls are all I need!

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

I’m a spoiled freelancer who will probably never go back to work for any one company again.  I love the freedom to work when it’s convenient for me, the variety of projects I get to touch, and the perk of getting to travel to neat new places with my family.  I’ve been asked to join some companies I love and it was hard to turn them down, but none of them could compete with these benefits.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

That’s a tough question.  I literally have 33 items on my project list at the moment.  I never hurt for ideas, just the time to complete them.  Because of that, I’m leery to promise what I will get to.  I’ll tell you what I do know though.

My current project is the Red Dirt RubyConf. This is the second year I’ve helped organize that event.  We work super hard on building a world class program that we would want to see at a Ruby conference and we succeeded beyond our expectations last year.  So, naturally, this year will be bigger and better.  I encourage all Rubyists to check us out.  We’re worth it.  I know because I’m totally unbiased.

After that, I swear I’m going to complete a blog migration I’ve been working on forever now.  I have a new design and I built a fun new backend for it.  I need to get that online.

Finally, I hope you’ll see one new thing from me this year that I’ve never done before.  Wish me luck!

Who is Salvatore Sanfilippo?

I’m a programmer based in Sicily, Italy, 33 years old. I believe that programming is a fight against complexity, and that reinventing the wheel is a good thing. I work for VMware, my goal is to develop the Redis data structure server.

Where and when did you start programming?

I started programming when I was a child, since my father bought a Texas Instrument TI 99/4A. I was six and barely able to write but started copying basic programs in this device, to finally type RUN and see the program running. Eventually I started modifying programs I was copying, learning to write BASIC programs.

I never took programming as a too serious thing until the time I was 18. I installed Linux in my PC and started hacking with C to write “demos” to create graphical effects and things like this. I also got more and more involved with security. Later with programming languages, and finally with databases.

What’s Redis?

Redis is a domain specific language with a networking interface, and with persistent global variables. But I let people believe it’s a database.

You favorite Languages/Frameworks? And why?

I like languages with simple orthogonal ideas. My preferred languages from the point of view of the ideas they export are: C, Scheme, FORTH, Self.

Then there are other languages that are real world compromises to model real world problems in an efficient way. My preferred one is Ruby, not just for the language but also for the approach to the idea of programming of the Ruby community. People think that Ruby and Python are similar languages, and they actually are mostly. What is really different is the mindset of the average user. I like the Ruby mindset.

If there is something I hate in programming is over engineering. If something can be that simple, this is what it should be. Sometimes to get that missing feature costs a lot of complexity. A good programmer must recognize the right tradeoff between complexity and features. Design is the sacrifice of what is not very useful for the essence of what you are creating.

What does your typical day look like?

I get up at 9:00 am, do a fast breakfast and start hacking on Redis from home. At 2:30 pm I take my son from school and go to lunch in an office near my home, where there are other friends of mine writing programs too. I go in my office there, and hack on Redis while my son is doing his home works. Around 7 pm I go home, and prepare dinner together with my girlfriend and my son :)

A few times a week from 2:30 to 3:00 pm I do a meeting with my friends running a company where I’m involved as share holder and advisor, but where I dont’ write any code. This company develops iPad and iPhone software for customers.

In weekends and holidays I either go around with my girlfriend or do Redis hacking sessions in a completely relaxed way, trying new ideas and directions.

What do you do in your free time?

Mostly sport (swimming pool and running), visiting places around in Sicily, going in Tuscany from time to time, watching an insane amount of sci-fi series, going to the pub with my friends, drinking some good wine.

Current favorite apps?

I like google chrome, VLC, Tweetdeck for mac, as client apps.
For downloading stuff I like Transmission with the web interface, installed in a small box that is just a “file server + torrent” thing.
I like the Sinatra web framework for writing Ruby applications.
I love Git, now that I finally know it decently, thanks to the Redis community.
I love the Vim editor: I spent most of my time in an xterm with Vim.

What OS do you prefer?

Mac OS X as a client, and Linux for development and server stuff. I use the Ubuntu distribution for everything Linux related.

Small picture for your Workplace?

As you can see my son is doing his homework :)

Name something that has inspired you recently?

My super hero is Alan Kay. The Italian programmer Marco Pantaleoni inspired a lot of my passion in programming languages and algorithms.

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

I always worked as freelance in the past, with very very small employment periods. Now at VMware I do Redis programming. Clearly my experience at VMware is the dream position for me, I can hack on my project and VMware is completely supportive and has bright hackers inside to exchange interesting ideas. Basically I’m not sure I know what the usual employee experience is to comment about it.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

I think 2011 will be a crucial year for Redis. I hope I’ll see Redis adopted more and more, and to see at the end of the year Redis “diskstore” and “cluster” projects working great. I also hope that in 2011 I’ll make my employer happy about the work I’m doing so that I can continue the Redis project with VMware.


Who is Eloy Durán?

A 29 years old Dutch guy with Bolivian heritage, born and raised in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), for whom the world revolves around musical rhythms. Not a hardcore geek, or at least never thought of
myself as a geek. Yet, here I am, so there you go.

Where and when did you start programming?

I started playing a bit with BASIC around the age of twelve. But it was just fooling around a bit, not sure if you’d really consider it programming, let’s call it doodling. It was by chance that I got into programming again when I started working as a system administrator, about seven years ago. Which in itself was by chance, as is the story of my complete professional career. So you could say it really started out of an ‘itch to scratch’. And I have a lot of these itches, despite my daily shower!

Why Ruby?

As a system administrator I had to do quite a bit of scripting. As I’m quite anal about code having to be readable, and being the autodidact that I am, I scoured the internet for scripting languages and eventually stumbled upon Ruby. (It made the job a lot more fun too! As I have to admit that system administration, for me, feels more like a whac-a-mole type of game. And I’m not really the type to hit animals and enjoy it. YMMV.)

Don’t mistake me for a language geek, though, it was all out of pragmatism. I think that last word might have even tipped me off to Ruby, as this was around the time Ruby on Rails was released for the first time and looking up the word ‘pragmatic’ in the dictionary almost resulted in a picture of Matz and DHH ;)

Around that time I started playing with RubyCocoa, and became a contributor not long thereafter. This was my first real foray into open-source land and I guess that has really contributed to the fact that I’ve kept using Ruby. Because amongst tons of joy, working on open-source software has also brought me the great job I currently have at Fingertips.

What does your typical day look like?

Trying to get up on time, walk our dog, and (trying to) have something decent for breakfast. Then hop in my wooden shoes and onto my bike, or boat, and head to our office (which is conveniently situated in a windmill in a tulip field!) for a day of work on client work, which is mostly Ruby on Rails, or one of our own products. The latter involves Objective-C and Nu for iOS, and MacRuby for a desktop application and making fun of eachother.

What do you do in your free time?

Foremost a lot of walking with our dog, although most spectators will probably think the dog is walking us, and they’d probably be right… Then, when I’m not working on MacRuby or numerous other open-source libraries, I make and listen to a lot of music, watch some tv-series (“EX-TERRR-MINATE” anyone?), and play (video) games with friends. Besides that, my fiancée and I have been in the process of getting a new houseboat build, which takes quite some effort as well, but once finished just sitting in the living room and enjoying the view/being happy with ourselves will probably be our new number one hobby.

Current favorite apps?

* Ableton Live
* Echofon
* Spotify
* GitHub
* StreamToMe
* IRB
* The new public transport chip card system, I like confusing the hell out of it
* And last, but not least, Dictionary.app

What OS do you prefer?

Speaking purely from a user point of view (or ‘what would aunt Jannie think’ as I like to call it) it would definitely be OS X. In general the environment seems to encourage better user-experience in applications.

When working on music, I do not like to have to think about the computer too much, but ‘just have it work’. Which is a thing where OS X really shines, as Apple makes both the hardware and software, there are only so many combinations of hardware that need to be tested. Very different from my Windows-era, where you had to think about things like which USB chipset you have. And again, aunt Jannie would probably just think ‘my-ass-be set what?!’. Not very friendly, to say the least.

Small picture for your Workplace?

On this particular day, I was working on the music for a commercial of our iOS app ‘Crop and Straighten’. From the middle to all other directions that’s; Rebirth on the iPad, RubyKaigi 2009 lanyard (the only one I’ve ever saved), xmas lights (because it’s always xmas in my heart!), coffee (pretty self-explanatory), and the Unicode bible
(because it’s oh-so important to respect international users! And NO, an ‘a’ without acute accent is *not* the same as an ‘a’ with acute accent. And definitely *not* an “illegal character”! Whatever that might even mean, should we deport them…?).

Favorite: IDE, Language, JS Framework?

I currently use (Mac)Vim. I love it’s speed and splitviews, but I don’t really dig the ‘make a sandwich with only two keystrokes’ kind of user-experience. On top of that I’m not a big tweaker of config files, so I probably miss out on a lot. I can’t remember ever having felt comfortable with any IDE, so for coding I prefer to have one editor and do the rest from the command-line. This way I don’t feel I need to learn similar tools over and over again. At least, that’s what my uninformed gut feeling tells me, but I like it that way.

I don’t really have a favorite language, but the most recent addition is Nu. Its syntax comes from lisp and macros have proven to be very useful *and* fun, by which I mean time-consuming.

It’s been a while since I’ve done any serious JS programming, but for applications I prefer the Prototype.js way over the inline jQuery way. It made unit testing a lot easier, in my opinion, and I’m a TDD type of guy. But I won’t pass judgement on you if you’re not, because again, aunt Jannie just wants it to work and for all she cares whenever she types in a search query it shoots of an email to a team of all-knowing pinguins on the Galapagos Islands who fax her back the results. We might call this AJAX, she would say that that’s a cleaning product, so it really doesn’t matter.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

With regards to life and music, I’m always inspired by my fiancée, family, and friends. For communication, over a medium such as the internet, a mixture of the no-nonsense and precise approach of my colleagues and super-positive approach of people like Florian Hanke and Aaron Patterson. Bonus points to Aaron for his typical enterprisey profile ;)

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

Full time employment, but only within companies where people are individuals, not numbers. Which feels about the same as when I worked freelance, but with the added benefits of a good employer who understands how the real-world operates. However, this means that there aren’t many other companies that fit my needs, in which case I’d
prefer freelance over steady income, any day.

My motto has always been, if you’re not happy where you are and have tried everything in your own power to improve things, then leave and move on. Don’t let steady income win over day-to-day happiness, as long as you just do what you need to do to make ends meet at the end of the day. And trust me, even things like hauling automobile parts around in a factory will be fun for a few months and at the very least will put things into perspective.

Don’t forget that you can always still hack on open-source software and fight crime and save the world by night! Even sounds better that way on your twitter profile.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

* Get our new houseboat finished
* Release a few MacRuby related projects
* Work on music regularly and release it
* Beating Laurent Sansonetti’s and Ninh Bui’s bottoms in a ‘born to be alive’ dance battle
* Spend left over Apple Developer Connection support hours on getting them to show Laurent how to perform better in the aforementioned battle
* Reaching the age of 30 and become all responsible and such, which I keep hearing about