RubyFringe

Blake Mizerany (Sinatra)

We'll post Blake's bio the moment he sends it to us!

Chris Wanstrath (ErrTheBlog)
http://errtheblog.com/

Chris Wanstrath lives in San Francisco and freaking loves Ruby. He writes for Err the Blog, works at Err Free, keeps in touch using FamSpam, and uses GitHub for everything else.

Damien Katz (CouchDB)
http://damienkatz.net/

Damien Katz has worked for Lotus, MySQL, IBM and is the creator of CouchDB. Damien will be doing this for a very long time to come. Damien wonders if writing your own bio in the 3rd person is intellectually honest. Damien is a total coding badass and will rock the motherfucking universe. Damien shits ice cream and can walk on water. At the age of 8, Damien coined the phrase "They are like oil and water: They don't mix." It quickly spread around the globe and enriched the lives of millions. Damien is happy to have helped. Damien has high hopes RubyFringe will be fun.

Dan Grigsby (Unpossible)
http://www.unpossible.com/

To suits, Dan was the founder of Merchant Planet, an early e-commerce provider ultimately acquired by Microsoft. Then he was the founder and initial developer of payMe.com, a successful early-days competitor to PayPal. Lately, he's been working with startups and as a turn around CTO.

To developers, Dan is a pretty respectable programmer who can turn a few thousand lines code into a business or use a few thousand lines of code to turn a business around.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz (Merb)
http://brainspl.at/

We'll post Ezra's bio the moment he sends it to us!

Geoffrey Grosenbach (Topfunky)
http://nubyonrails.com/

Geoffrey Grosenbach is the host of the official Ruby on Rails Podcast (http://podcast.rubyonrails.com) and producer of PeepCode screencasts (http://peepcode.com). He blogs at Nuby on Rails (http://nubyonrails.com).

Giles Bowkett (Archaeopteryx)
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/

Giles Bowkett has easily done enough acid to drive an entire herd of elephants insane forever. He's worked professionally with Perl, PHP,Python, Java, JavaScript, ActionScript - all the usual suspects – and now spends nearly all his time coding Ruby. Seriously, nearly all his time. He has a recipe in the upcoming "Advanced Rails Recipes" book, he's speaking at five conferences in three countries in 2008, he regularly checks in code before 8am on Saturdays, and between December and February 2007-2008 he released 9 open source projects (plus 2 more projects on RubyForge with no official releases, but enough code to play with, and 2 more projects on the way).

He actually really ought to consider getting out more. He also sometimes wonders if talking about himself in the third person is really such a good idea.

Giles played the part of Cop #2 in "Incrimination," a 2007 student film; released two white-label DJ records that barely sold; DJed at, organized, and promoted raves, parties, and club events in New Mexico and San Francisco; and contributed a drum and bass track to Ghost Dog Records' compilation "The End Of Everything" in 2005. His programming blog is at gilesbowkett.blogspot.com, and his art and music (and hand-drawn animation, and old code) are at gilesgoatboy.org.

Hampton Catlin (Haml/Unspace)
http://hamptoncatlin.com

Hampton Catlin was born in Jacksonville, Flordia, in 1982, on a sunny day with highs in the mid-80s and only a 20% chance of precipitation. He has been developing web applications since high school and fell in love with the web all over again when he found the Rails framework. The creator of the Haml markup language and Sass (Haml for CSS), Hampton is currently a partner at Unspace Interactive in Toronto.

Jay Phillips (Adhearsion)
http://jicksta.com/

Jay Phillips is an innovator in the spaces where sophisticated VoIP development falls apart and where Ruby rocks. As the creator of Adhearsion and its parent company Codemecca, Jay brings new possibilities to these two technologies through his work on the open-source Adhearsion framework.

Jeremy McAnally (entp)
http://blog.mrneighborly.com/

We'll post Jeremy's bio the moment he sends it to us!

John Lam (IronRuby)
http://www.iunknown.com/

John works on the IronRuby project at Microsoft. IronRuby is an Open Source implementation of Ruby that runs real Ruby programs. John and his family recently relocated to Seattle from Toronto and they're loving the left coast lifestyle.

Leila Boujnane (Idée)
http://www.hyperbio.net/

Leila Boujnane is Chief Executive Officer of Idee Inc, the firm she co–founded with Chief Technology Officer, Paul Bloore, in 1999. Leila has been instrumental in making Idée the leader in visual search and monitoring solutions for digital imaging. She is responsible for all aspects of the company's strategy and operations. (Photo by Rannie "Photojunkie" Turinga)

Luke Francl (Slantwise)

Luke Francl is a developer at Slantwise Design (http://slantwisedesign.com) and sometimes tech writer. Luke is a frequentpresenter at the Ruby Users of Minnesota, and has also presented at CodeCon, MinneBar, Ostrava on Rails, and acts_as_conference. He blogs at Rail Spikes (http://railspikes.com) and Just Looking (http://justlooking.recursion.org).

Matt Todd (Halcyon)
http://halcyon.rubyforge.org/

Matt Todd is the lead web application developer for Clayton State University's technical support hub in Atlanta, GA, which only recently switched fully to Ruby and Rails. He has been developing with Ruby for 3 years and Rails for 2 when they switched from PHP, in total developing web applications for 6 years.

Matt has been active in numerous open source communities, primarily involved with Halcyon, Thin, and Rack, but also or previously with Merb, CouchDB, Canvas, and PHP. He leads project development of Halcyon, a product of necessity at his work.

Nick Sieger (JRuby)
http://blog.nicksieger.com/

Nick Sieger is a staff engineer at Sun Microsystems where he has been

working on a team building a large JRuby on Rails application. He is a member of the JRuby core team, leading the effort to improve Rails deployment in a Java environment. He has been programming Ruby for three years, and Java for too many. He created and co-maintains the JDBC adapter for ActiveRecord that JRuby on Rails uses for database connectivity and several other integration bits to improve the JRuby on Rails experience. He maintains a blog on Ruby and JRuby-related topics at http://blog.nicksieger.com/.

Obie Fernandez (Hashrocket)
http://obiefernandez.com/

Obie Fernandez is widely-read blogger and rockstar coder -- one of the most recognizable figures in the Ruby on Rails world. His new consultancy Hashrocket, is rocking the development world with their 3-2-1 Launch program, and his book, The Rails Way, is rocking the Ruby book market as the number one expert reference for Ruby on Rails. Find out more about him at http://obiefernandez.com

Reg Braithwaite (Raganwald)
http://weblog.raganwald.com/

We'll post Reginald's bio the moment he sends it to us!

Tobias Lütke (jadedPixel)
http://blog.leetsoft.com/

Tobias Lütke is a co-founder of jadedPixel, creator of Shopify – one of the largest Rails applications on the web.

He has been part of the Ruby on Rails core team since its inception and has released numerous open source libraries such as Liquid Markup and ActiveMerchant. Tobi regularly writes about ruby, future web technologies, and advertising on blog.leetsoft.com.

Yehuda Katz (JQuery)
http://www.yehudakatz.com/

We'll post wycats' bio the moment he sends it to us!

Zed Shaw (Mongrel/Utu)
http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/

Aww, you motherfuckers. Okay. Alright. I'm putting cases on all you bitches. Huh. You think you can do this shit... Ruby. You think you can do this to me? You motherfuckers will be playing nintendo in Central Prison when I get finished with you. SHU program, bitch! 23 hour lockdown. I'm the man up in this piece. You'll never see the light of... who the fuck do you think you're fucking with? I'm fucking awesome, I run shit around here. You just live here. Yeah, that's right, you better walk away. Go on and walk away... 'cause I'm gonna' burn this motherfucker down. King Kong ain't got shit on me. That's right, that's right. Shit, I don't, fuck. I'm winning anyway, I'm winning... I'm winning any motherfucking way. I can't lose. Yeah, you can shoot me, but you can't kill me.