people

Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design. At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface.

Avdi Grimm is a professional developer. Over the course of his career he has worked on everything from aerospace embedded systems to enterprise web applications. He’s a consulting pair-programmer, the author of several popular Ruby programming books, and a recipient of the Ruby Hero award for service to the Ruby community. Since he has been helping developers deepen their coding practice at Graceful.Dev (formerly RubyTapas.com).

Dave Thomas is a computer programmer, author and editor. He has written about Ruby and together with Andy Hunt, he co-authored The Pragmatic Programmer and runs The Pragmatic Bookshelf publishing company. Thomas moved to the United States from England in 1994 and lives north of Dallas, Texas.

Thomas coined the phrases ‘Code Kata’ and ‘DRY’ (Don’t Repeat Yourself), and was an original signatory and author of The Manifesto for Agile Software Development. He studied computer science at Imperial College London.

Chris Oliver is a Ruby on Rails and Python developer, creator of GoRails, HatchBox, and Jumpstart Rails.

David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer and racing driver. As a programmer, he is the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki. He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm 37signals.

For two years, Gary Bernhardt published screencasts on various software development topics at Destroy All Software. It was very popular, but he got tired of talking to himself in a recording studio. he’s now working on an unannounced product related to finance (for good, not evil). He also speak at a lot of conferences: about 25 in the last three years.

Jason Fried is the founder of 37signals, a privately held web-based software development company and the co-author of the international bestseller Rework. His motto is, ‘It’s simple until you make it complicated’

José Valim, a graduate of the University of São Paulo, is the Brazilian creator of the Elixir programming language, and of the R&D project of Plataformatec, a subsidiary of nubank.

Software developer Katrina Owen created Exercism while she was teaching programming at Jumpstart Labs. The platform was developed as an internal tool to solve the problem of her own students not receiving feedback on the coding problems they were practicing.

Martin Fowler has written nine books on the topic of software development. He is a member of the Agile Alliance and helped create the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in 2001, along with 16 fellow signatories. He maintains a bliki, a mix of blog and wiki. He popularised the term Dependency Injection as a form of Inversion of Control.

Miguel “Mike” Beedle was an American software engineer and theoretical physicist who was a co-author of the Agile Manifesto. He was the co-author of the first book and earliest papers about Scrum.

Ryan Bates the creator of RailsCasts, Ruby on Rails Screencasts.

Sandi Metz is an American software engineer and author. She is the author of Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby. Metz teaches workshops around the country for new and experienced developers, emphasizing good programming habits and practices.

Yukihiro Matsumoto, also known as Matz, is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its original reference implementation, Matz’s Ruby Interpreter.