Who is Avdi Grimm?

I am a bipedal, long-haired mammal residing near York, Pennsylvania, USA. I’m a husband, father, and cat cushion. I write software, write and speak about writing software, host podcasts, and consume dangerous amounts of coffee.

What does your typical day look like?

I get up between 10 and 11AM EST, and hang out with my wife and kids until noon. At noon I go down to my office in the basement and work until 7PM. “Working” for me is some combination of: answering emails, attending meetings remotely, writing code for clients, writing blog posts, researching and writing for a book, hacking on one of my personal coding projects, recording screencasts, podcasting, remote pair-programming or tutoring, or pacing around my office thinking about my next scheme to take over the world. From 7 to 10 I eat dinner, spend some more time with the family, and put the younger kids to bed. Then it’s back to work until 2-3AM.

What do you do in your free time?

Pretty much all of my non-work time is spent chilling with my wife and four kids.

Where and when did you start programming?

When I was twelve or thirteen I taught myself REXX on OS/2 so I could write text adventure games. My first program was a work of interactive fiction which told the poignant tale of two rooms, one of which contained a cat, the other of which did not.

Favorite: Programming Languages, Frameworks?

I’m a polyglot programmer, but I’ve particularly enjoyed working with Ruby since I came across it back in 2001. It strikes a rare balance between pragmatism, expressiveness, and conceptual elegance.

What OS do you prefer?

Any Debian-derived GNU/Linux distribution. I’ve used DOS, OS/2, Solaris, Mac OS 9 and OS X, assorted Linux distros, as well as countless flavors of Windows. Debian Linux is still the only one where I can be confident that any program I might need is just a “sudo apt-get install” away from being installed, configured, and ready to go.

Current favorite apps?

Emacs and Org-Mode.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Name something that has inspired you recently?

My colleagues at CodeBenders inspire me to be a better programmer every day.

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

Definitely freelance. Freelance work has given me the flexibility to pursue a lot of projects that just weren’t possible while I was full-time employed. I can choose to allocate my time to my own pursuits without feeling like I’m stealing time from my employer.

What are your goals for 2012?

Stay home, write more books, and try ALL of the bourbons.

Who is Jamis Buck?

I’m just this guy, you know? ;) I’ve been married (blissfully!) for 14 years now. My wife and I live in Idaho, USA, and we have four kids, ranging in age from 2 to 9. We homeschool, and when you combine that with the fact that I work from home, this means I get to spend a lot of time with my kids, and I love that. I enjoy woodcarving, string figures, epic fantasy, playing the guitar, cooking, and (most recently) researching my family history. Mostly I just love learning new things. :) I speak English primarily, but I also know Korean (sadly, I’ve lost a lot of my skill there, but I can still read it okay).

What does your typical day look like?

I wake up around 6:30 or (on a particularly tired day) 7. My wife and I alternate “exercise” days, so I run in the mornings on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. We then do our morning meeting as a family, where we make our plans and figure out our schedule, and then I help the younger kids get ready for the day. I log into work around 8, pause for breakfast at 8:30, and then really begin my workday around 9. I stop again for lunch around noon, and quit for the day around 5.
In the evening I help entertain the kids so my wife can have a break for an hour, and then I either help clean up, or make dinner, depending on the day (my wife and I trade off). In the evenings I like to practice my guitar, and tinker on side projects.

What do you do in your free time?

For the last 9 months or so I’ve been pretty obsessed with learning the guitar, so I’ve spent a lot of time on that. Lately, I’ve started doing some family history research, and that in turn has inspired me to start tinkering on an app for recording my findings.

Where and when did you start programming?

I *first* was introduced to programming in the early 80′s, in elementary school, where we did some turtle graphics on Apple II/e. I didn’t come back to it until around 1990, the summer before my junior year, when my parents got a Tandy and I found the BASIC manual that came with it. I taught myself BASIC, and then Turbo Pascal, and then C, and basically devoured whatever I could find related to computer programming. I’ve been hooked ever since.

Favorite: Programming Languages, Frameworks?

My favorite programming language for the last 10+ years is Ruby, but lately I think CoffeeScript has been giving it a run for its money. I’ve played with quite a few other languages (most recently scala and erlang, and objective-c), but none have captured my heart and imagination like Ruby has. I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for C, though. I love so much about C, including (!) memory management. I don’t get to write C code much anymore, but I always enjoy it when I do.

Favorite frameworks: Ruby on Rails, definitely; I’m in that every day, and while I won’t say I’ve never been frustrated with it, it is so much nicer than any other web framework that I’ve ever used. I’m not a big consumer of other frameworks; most of what I use is part of the standard Ruby library.

What OS do you prefer?

Definitely OS X. I recently upgraded to OS X Lion, and while it hasn’t been without it’s flaws, I’ve really been impressed with it. Prior to OS X, I ran Gentoo and I enjoyed a lot of things about that. But it would take a lot, at this point, for me to go back to Linux as my primary OS.

Current favorite apps?

MacVim, Google Chrome, Twitter. Noteflight.com. Angry Birds. :) I’d be lost without GitHub. Also, rbenv, TabToolkit (for iPad).

Small picture for your Workplace?

Name something that has inspired you recently?

Family history research! Specifically, looking for clues about my paternal great-great-great grandfather, Samuel Buck, who’s been a great-great-great mystery for decades. I’ve managed to find a few new leads on him, reinvigorating some of that research. Related to that: I’ve enjoyed learning songs that my great-*-grandparents sang, and learning them on the guitar.

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

Definitely full-time employment. I’m not much of a risk-taker (but I greatly admire those who are). Especially in this economy, I like having the security of a regular paycheck.

What are your goals for 2011?

I’ve been fighting burn-out for a couple of years, and I think I might finally be on the mend! One of my goals for 2011, then, is to not “overdo” it. I’ve been focusing a lot in recent years on non-computer hobbies and interests, and while it has resulted in me being less vocal (on my blog and elsewhere) and also working on fewer software projects, I think I’ve been happier overall.

Who is Christian Neukirchen?

Christian Neukirchen (aka chris2) has been programming Ruby since 2001. As lead developer of the abstract webserver interface Rack, he is committed to unifying the Ruby web development landscape.  He also authored several other Ruby libraries, among them the popular BDD frameworks test/spec and bacon. To the Internet community, he is known for creating the first tumblelog, Anarchaia, and its successor Trivium.
Currently he is studying Mathematics and Computer Science in Munich.

What does your typical day look like?

When hungry I eat, when tired I sleep, when I want to hack, I hack.

What do you do in your free time?

What’s that, free time?

Where and when did you start programming?

My first programs were in QBASIC, perhaps 1996 or something?  Later I learned Pascal and C, awk, Perl, until I stumbled upon Ruby.  I also learned a lot about language design and looked a lot at more academic languages like Scheme, ML, Haskell.  I’m a programming language geek.

Favorite: Programming Languages, Frameworks?

My dream language doesn’t exist, but Ruby is pretty close to it. Sometimes I wish, it had better support for functional programming.
I don’t really use any frameworks, except Rack of course.  I have a few small wrapper libraries I use for my own stuff.

What OS do you prefer?

Anything unixish.  I currently work on Linux mainly, but I have used OS X for a few years.  I don’t want back.  I run Arch Linux and Debian on my machines.  Sometimes I consider switching to BSDs.  I have a few BSD servers.  OpenBSD is my favorite, because they like to keep stuff simple.

Plan 9 has been a great inspiration on how to work with computers, I run plan9ports on most machines.

Current favorite apps?

I use the not very well-known window manager cwm(1) from OpenBSD.  I despise so called “desktop envionments”.  Just give me a few shells (I use the Z shell heavily, usually in urxvt) and editor windows.  I do lots of things in Emacs.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Imagine a cluttered desk with a small notebook on top.  It mostly looks like that, nevermind where I work right now.

You can have a look at a typical screenshot:

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I recently picked up Erlang again, which I last used a few years ago. It is a fascinating language and development environment.  I was productive immediately, and it’s so easy to interactively develop with
it.

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

Since I’m a student, freelancing on the side is the way to go.

What are your goals for 2011?

I want to finally finish my bachelor thesis!

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 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 Jonas Nicklas?

I’m a Ruby developer and JavaScript enthusiast currently working at Elabs in Gothenburg, Sweden. I emigrated to sunny Sweden from Germany roughly nine years ago and I’m not looking back. In the Ruby community I’m probably best known for being the author of a couple of popular open source libraries, including the integration testing framework Capybara and the file upload solution CarrierWave.

Where and when did you start programming?

I started programming when I was maybe eight years old. I had a old 286 in my bedroom, it couldn’t do much more than process text and run QBASIC. My parents challenged me with some simple problems, which they then helped me to implement. I don’t have any formal education in anything computer related, for the longest time I resisted making computers my career. Before I started working at Elabs I was almost entirely self-taught.

Why Ruby/Rails?

I’ve never found a programming language which allows me to express my thoughts as clearly and concisely as Ruby. I’m a high level computing kind of guy, Ruby allows me to write code the way I think. I found Rails when I was dabbling in PHP and hating it, that was back in 2005, I think. I found it by accident, and loved it at first sight. I haven’t been seriously tempted to switch to anything else since.

What does your typical day look like?

Come into work late. Pair program on client projects all morning. Go out for lunch, be the last person to finish eating. Pair program some more. Play some ping-pong in between pair programming sessions. Finish work. Maybe go to the gym, lift some weights. Go to a dance class or social dance. Go home. Eat. Watch some television. Fall asleep. Repeat.

What do you do in your free time?

My passion is dancing. I dance mostly Salsa, but also some other partner dances, West Coast Swing, Bachata, Zouk, etc… I also started to do contemporary dance just a couple of weeks ago. Lately I’ve been getting into weightlifting, which I find surprisingly enjoyable. I’m still a novice, so I don’t have too much muscles to show for it yet. I go climbing roughly once a week, just for fun. After all of that and hanging out with friends and so on, I have way too little time to spend on my open-source projects :(

Current favorite apps?

MacVIM. I don’t really need anything else ;)

What OS do you prefer?

Mac OS X

Small picture for your Workplace?

Name something that has inspired you recently?

Being at RubyConf and seeing first hand how large the Ruby community really is. Also at RubyConf, the standing ovation after Matz’s talk was very moving. I’m also inspired by seeing amazing dancers perform, be it on stage or at a club.

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

At the moment I prefer full employment, since it gives me a steady paycheck, and a schedule which allows me to devote a lot of time to my other interests.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

To improve my fitness and strength. To become a better dancer. To spend time with my amazing family, friends and colleagues. To finally release a 1.0 version of Capybara.

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 Konstantin Haase?

Well, that’s me. And, according to Google, some doctor. I don’t know much about him, but I am an IT student from Potsdam, Germany, working part time as a Rails developer for Finnlabs and spending a lot of my free time on open source projects.

Where and when did you start programming?

Nearly 14 years ago my family and me got our first computer. Shortly after that I started to learn programming. QBasic. I think the initial reason for doing so was that our computer sucked big time compared to what my class mates had, so all their fancy games wouldn’t run on my machine. Plus we didn’t have internet access, so there really wasn’t much else to do with it. QBasic was preinstalled and included documentation, some introduction from a friend of my parents and I was hooked.

You favorite Languages/Frameworks? And why?

The language I feel most comfortable with is Ruby. It is not the cleanest nor the most expressive language, but it is extremely flexible compared to most mainstream language. Moreover, the POLS that can not only be found in Ruby itself, but most popular projects the vibrant ruby community produces also follow it. I really enjoy Rubinius. If you fancy code reading, you should check out its source.

If you ever accidentally visited my Github profile page, you might have already noticed: I love Sinatra, it’s super simple and still extremely powerful. Less than 2000 SLOC, that usually do exactly what you want and bend to your will.

Not that you think I’m a total Ruby head: I also spend a fair amount of time in Smalltalk, mainly for academic topics, and I like it. There are some other languages I also find rather attractive. Like, CoffeeScript. I’m not much of a JavaScript hacker anyways, but whenever possible, I try to use CoffeeScript instead. Prolog is also amazing, I just have no real use for it.

What does your typical day look like?

I get up at eight. Go, to the bathroom, eat breakfast, you know, the full deal. Usually I run to get the bus. If it’s Tuesday or Friday, or Wednesday and I haven’t got anything else to do, I take the S-Bahn to Berlin for work. This takes about 40 mins, which I usually spend hacking on some open source project. On the other week days, I go to university, usually hanging out in the same room where I managed to snatch some office space. There I’m in mixed mode: I work on university projects, but I also do some open source stuff, if I’m not too busys. If I’m lucky my university projects and open source hacking overlap, well, maybe that’s just wishful thinking. When I get home, I usually spend some more time on open source projects. Unless I’m to exhausted from work/university.

What do you do in your free time?

Open source hacking. Some photography. More open source hacking. Spending time with my significant other. I really spend a lot of time on open source.

Current favorite apps?

I’m not much of an app guy, in the sense of iPhone/Mac apps. So, well, RVM, Redcar and Homebrew.

What OS do you prefer?

Everything Unix. For my laptop I switched from Linux to Mac OSX about two years ago, but I wouldn’t mind going back.

Small picture for your Workplace?

One of my workplaces (at home):

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I attended two talks by one of the PyPy guys recently, one about partial evaluation, one about automatically generating a Python VM from the PyPy interpreter and partially compiling Python to native code. That was really inspiring.

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

To be honest: I’m not sure, really. I never did any serious freelance work, in fact, I have not been paid for hacking until October ’09, so I’m probably not the best person to get advice from. It’s more important to have fun and earn money on a somewhat regular basis. I would definitely prefer freelancing over working full time in a cubical or something like that. Also, I like pair programming, so freelancing on my own might be a bit boring from time to time.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

Going to more conferences. I was at RubyConf 2010 in New Orleans. That was just amazing. If you want to meet me: I’ll be at the Scottish Ruby Conference, and I’m planning to attend at least Nordic Ruby and Euruko.