Ruby Skills was created because of the increased demand for solid Ruby developers.
People
Lance Carlson has been a Ruby and a Rails developer for over 3 years and is the owner of a consulting company in Ann Arbor, Michigan called Ruby Skills. He has co-authored the second edition of the book “Ruby on Rails: Up and Running” with Bruce Tate, published by O’Reilly Media available October, 2008.
- Twitter: lancecarlson
- Delicious: lancer
- AIM: rubyskills
Michael Erb is a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of Information Technology with extensive experience in nearly every aspect of the industry. With over 13 years of professional experience with the likes of General Motors, Chrysler, Chase Manhattan, and NASA, he has seen first-hand how big budgets and big teams rarely lead to quality results. He spends most of his professional time these days consulting with small and mid-sized companies, helping them maximize their technology investments.
David Leal lives on the cutting edge of technology and has a knack for learning new things quickly. For over 8 years, he has implemented solutions for a range of projects in the telecomm industry, the web and mapping applications. His most notable accomplishments in the Ruby community are his contributions to the open source project Datamapper.
Why Ruby?
The ease at which you can express business logic using Ruby is unprecedented. In every programming language, there is a portion of code noise that must be written due to its limitations. Examples of this noise in C and C++ are pointers, which are used to store memory throughout the application. In Java you must specify types for each class, method, and input defined. As a consequence, the tools used to write these languages were made more powerful, rather than improving and streamlining the language itself.
Ruby, handles garbage collection automatically and does not require that you specify types. It also has powerful built in language constructs that enable you to construct domain specific languages to solve domain specific problems. Using Ruby, programmers can focus on the business logic, and spend less time writing legacy code.
History
Ruby was designed and created by a computer scientist turned language architect named "Yukihiro Matsumoto" (also known as Matz). It was first conceived on February 24th, 1993. The first and most widely used version of Ruby is called the MRI which stands for "Matz's Ruby Interpreter". Matz, "wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python...". We wanted the same thing.
The owner of Ruby Skills met Matz when he was chosen to speak at the Lone Star Ruby Conference in 08. It was an honor.
Company
Ruby Skills is presently located on lower level of 330 East Liberty St. in Ann Arbor, MI. A map of the location is below:
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