About
Whether you’re looking for a strong start to your new project or you just want to improve your existing situation, our experienced team has the knowledge and resources to help your web application take off.
- Headquartered on the Beach in Northeast Florida
- Experts in Ruby on Rails Web Application Development
- Business Consultants for Web Startups
The Team
Obie Fernandez
Obie is a recognized tech industry leader and independent consultant. He has been hacking computers since he got his first Commodore VIC-20 in the Eighties, and found himself in the right place and time as a programmer on some of the first Java enterprise projects of the mid-Nineties. He has been evangelizing Ruby and Rails online via blog posts and publications since early 2005 and specializes in the development and marketing of large-scale, web-based applications. Obie recently published The Rails Way, a comprehensive guide to Ruby on Rails standards and development.
Jon Larkowski
Our resident ping-pong-loving speed metal guitarist, Jon Larkowski holds an Electrical Engineering degree, has seven years experience in Microsoft-platform web development (sssh…don’t tell anyone), experience with Agile methodologies and full-spectrum skills ranging from database management to graphic design. Following his recent career transition to that of Rails development, he created RubyJax, a Jacksonville Ruby & Rails user group. He often sports a bandana, which puts him in the same category as both Axl Rose and stylish Labrador Retrievers.
Desi McAdam
Hailing from the great state (and former penal colony) of Georgia, developer Desi McAdam is the team’s resident bleeding heart. Along with founding DevChix, an organization geared specifically toward women in development, she’s a member of other socially progressive and humanitarian groups. She’s nearing the completion of her pilot’s license, likes to break into tourist attractions around the world and wants to wrestle a pig someday. Desi has a broad background of skills from system administration to web development (including several years experience with Agile practices) and earned her degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.
Clay Kromberg
As a designer that received a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design from the University of Florida School of Art, Clay has a passion for all things visual and creative (painting, sculpture, photography, etc.). He enjoys traveling, which quenches his thirst to constantly explore and learn new things. And when he’s not satisfying the artistic demons within, you can find him either surfing, relaxing or banging his head on things.
Jim Remsik
A senior member of the team, “Big Tiger” is originally from Madison, Wisconsin and has several years of government-sector, full life-cycle business process automation projects under his belt. A recent transplant to Jacksonville Beach, he enjoys taking vanity shots of his 'fro, losing to the Blade at ping-pong and suckin' on a chili dawg outside the Tastee Freeze.
Nick Strate
Known in the office as “the Blade,” Nick is the team’s grammar guru, usability associate and information architect. Nick graduated from the University of Florida in 2001 with a degree in English Literature, likes to follow tide charts and is currently at work on his first collection of timeless aphorisms.
Les Hill
Mr. Hill has at various times been a founder, CTO, and a VP of Engineering, but his real passion is crafting software. Mr. Hill has a wide range of experience from developing self-organizing P2P networks to creating one of the first AJAX driven web applications (long before the acronym was coined!). He has been a longtime proponent of Agile development practices and small, smartly managed and motivated teams as the way to outperform. He lives by the beach with his lovely wife and beautiful daughter.
Wes Gibbs
Wes jumped on the Rails in 2007 to escape the malaise brought on by 10 years of writing Java code. He has lived and worked in many places around the world and traveled quite a bit, yet somehow seems to always wind up near a beach. He's a graduate of the University of Florida and stays fit(ish) with lots of cycling and swimming. He and his lovely wife and son live in Neptune Beach, FL.
Ben McDonald
If you get on the phone with Hashrocket, you’ll likely talk to Ben. He gets projects in the door and makes sure they’re staffed with the best fit for the client, both culturally and technically. In a previous life he worked as a software engineer at Symantec, Koders.com, Xcelerate (now Avenue A / Razorfish), and - for a very brief, painful period of time - NASA. Before that, his parents paid for him to drink beer at Georgia Tech where he somehow also managed to graduate with some BS in Computer Science. When not riding the Hashrocket, he is a family man raising two sons with his wife Sherry.
Sandro Turriate
Sandro first experimented with Ruby in college...after experimenting with Tina, Nancy and a mall security guard named Louie. His first Ruby programming accomplishment was writing a translator which converted assembly code into hexadecimal. Not only was his code one-fourth the size of his peer's Java code, it also felt much more natural than Python — then his programming language of choice. When Sandro isn't writing Rails he devises ways to share Rails goodness with the Python community, rewrites other people's applications just to see if he can, surfs, cycles, and should be going snowboarding in South America this summer.
Matt Remsik
Matt Remsik ("Veez" in Hashrocket parlance) spent seven years in government and non-profit sector organizations, which was a natural extension of his low-key, get-it-done mentality; he bought his first IBM PC with paper route money when he was twelve years old. Languishing in the world of Microsoft technologies, he's been desperately awaiting the opportunity to embrace the lightness and transparency of open-source software. Hashrocket has finally provided him this chance. Veez has a monastic devotion to poverty (and beer), loves turn-based strategy games, and can diagnose problems with your car engine by the various smells and noises it makes.
Marian Phelan
The purse-strings and moral center of the operation, Marian Phelan began her formal training at the Chartered Institute of Certified Accountants in the UK. Since 1990, she’s been the CFO and COO of several printing and film production companies in California and Florida, as well as of a wildlife reserve and lodge development in South Africa. In 2002, she moved to Jacksonville Beach to become the CFO for Mark Smith’s projects, which include an online directory service, an audio recording company, an environmental non-profit and, most recently, Hashrocket.
Mark Smith
Mark’s multinational upbringing, innate curiosity and youthful exuberance has fostered in him a view of mankind that shuns repression, fear and close-mindedness. He’s carried this view, as well as an unceasing faith in human potential into all of his present-day businesses, wherein his love for emerging, constantly changing technology plays a crucial role. A perennially altruistic renegade, Mark’s brief, albeit earth-shattering manifesto on the benefits of development constraints was a huge inspiration to the Hashrocket project.