The FiveRuns Rails Advisory Council was formed in January of 2007 during the Rails Edge conference in Reston, VA as part of our vision to provide a suite of products that reduces developer and system administrator pain and simplifies the Rails development and deployment lifecycle.
Our goal for the advisory council is quite simple: to ensure we’re listening to the community and building what is needed most by assembling an expert set of Rails advisors to assist us as we design and bring these products to market.
Inaugural Council Members
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Chad Fowler has been a software developer and manager for some of the world’s largest corporations. Until recently, Chad lived and worked in India, setting up and leading an offshore software development center. He is also co-founder of Ruby Central, Inc., a non-profit corporation responsible for the annual International Ruby and Rails Conferences, a leading contributor in the Ruby community and a contributor and editor for numerous books. Chad’s most recent book is Rails Recipes, published by the Pragmatic Programmers.
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Marcel Molina Jr. is a member of the Rails Core Team. He went from being a literature major to a programmer. In his transition from natural language to machine language, he found Ruby an elegant balance of dynamic, pragmatic, and “humane”. And then along came Rails… He lives in Austin, Texas.
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Bruce Williams is a software developer and designer based near Boulder, CO. He regularly writes about techniques and tricks for developing Rails views developed building one of the largest Rails apps in existence. Bruce contributed to Rails Recipes, was the technical editor for Ruby for Rails, and, working for Ruby Central, Inc., handles the design work for RubyConf and RailsConf. Bruce also recently joined the FiveRuns development team.
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Rich Kilmer is well-known in the Ruby development community both as an open-source contributor, speaker and as a Board member of the non-profit Ruby Central organization. Rich’s company, InfoEther runs the Ruby Forge site on behalf of Ruby Central which in turn is the source of thousands of Ruby projects and is the main download point for the popular Ruby-on-Rails Web development framework. Rich was previously the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Roku, one of the first peer-to-peer software companies.
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Michael 'Koz' Koziarski is a software consultant specializing in Ruby-on-Rails, database architecture, web based businesses and object oriented design. He’s been a contributor to Rails since 2004, a Rails Core Team member since 2005 and helps other programmers improve their code on The Rails Way, a popular Rails architecture weblog.
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Rick Olson blames Ruby on Rails for destroying his ASP.Net career. After tinkering in the framework for nearly a year, he decided to start full-time freelancing on Rails projects in January of 2006 and couldn’t be happier. He’s behind the Rails Weenie community help site, a member of the Rails Core Team, and has released the open source weblog Mephisto along with numerous plugins.
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Tobias Lütke encountered Rails while struggling to find technology for his new company. Once found, he quickly ported the bits and pieces of his code over to Ruby which later became the first rails based e-commerce store known as “Snowdevil”. Tobi is a partner at JadedPixel, as well as a member of the Rails Core Team, and is frantically working on Shopify which is the continuation of the Snowdevil code base. Over time, Tobi released many open source projects such as Typo, Hieraki, and Liquid.
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Jeremy Kemper is a programmer at 37signals, working from his home in Portland, Oregon. Hot on the heels of David Heinemeier Hansson, he has been the most active contributor to Rails. He’s knee deep in pretty much all aspects of the framework as a member of the Rails Core Team and one of the top batters against new, incoming tickets.
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Jamis Buck is a repentant Java programmer who never really enjoyed Java, but who finally found web-programming joy in Rails. He is an avid Ruby programmer, having contributed several packages to the community (including Net::SSH, Net::SFTP, Syntax, sqlite-ruby, sqlite3-ruby, Capistrano (formerly SwitchTower) and others). He is currently employed at 37signals, working from his home in Caldwell, Idaho.
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Ezra Zygmuntowicz, after taking to Rails in 2004 has become a seasoned expert in Rails application deployment and a regular contributor in the Rails community though speaking engagements, his work at Engine Yard and as the author of merb, a pocket framework allowing faster serving of dynamic pages in Rails. Ezra is the author of Rails Deployment: Production Configuration and Advanced Rails Tactics which will be published by The Pragmatic Programmers in early 2007.
If you are interested in contributing to the FiveRuns Rails Advisory Council, please contact us at .
