Rocketeers
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Obie Fernandez
Obie is a recognized tech industry leader and was a successful independent consultant before founding Hashrocket with Mark Smith and Marian Phelan. Obie 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 is the author of The Rails Way, a comprehensive guide to Ruby on Rails standards and development.
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Mark Smith
Co-founder and Chairman, 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, a CIS degree and 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. To slake his longtime thirst for creating a top-notch consultancy and products cult, Mark and his partner Marian Phelan undertook a search for the best minds in the Rails community which led to a fortuitous meeting with Obie Fernandez. A friendship and partnership was struck between the three and Hashrocket was born. Under the care of Obie and Marian, the Hashrocket cool-aid has slaked Mark's thirst. But, another is building...
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Marian Phelan
CFO and Co-founder. Marian brings more than 20 years of business management experience to Hashrocket. She began her formal financial training with the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants in Ireland before moving to the USA in 1989. She has held several senior finance and management roles in locations as diverse as South Africa. She has a wide range of industry experience in print online advertising, film, wildlife reserve operations and most recently Hashrocket.
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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.
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Jon Larkowski
Jon "Lark" Larkowski is employee number one or two at Hashrocket, depending on how you count. He holds an Electrical Engineering/Computer Science degree from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jon co-founded RubyJax: Jacksonville, Florida's best and only Ruby user group. He heroically escaped a bleak, dystopian world of .Net, grey cubicles and demoralizing waterfall methodologies, and now luxuriates beachside under palms, enjoying agile project management and extreme Rails development. Jon hails from scenic Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, home of speedy Cray Supercomputers and refreshing Leinenkugel's beer. Lately, he's into the easier kinds of yoga, the heavier brands of Scandinavian progressive metal, and the spinnier style of ping pong.
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Sal Cardello
As our Director of Operations, Sal Cardello is the primary point of contact for all Hashrocket clients and makes sure that the client-developer relationship stays open, productive and mutually beneficial. With over 25 years experience in the industry — most with successful start-ups — Sal understands the importance of having a great staff and, even more so, satisfied clients.
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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.
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Durran Jordan
Starting as an ANSI artist for bulletin boards in the late 80s, Durran hacked his way through to the Java world in the late 90's where he became a successful developer and agile consultant on 3 different continents. A prior colleague of Obie's at MediaOcean and Thoughtworks, he has delivered countless enterprise and desktop applications, as well as having his hand in just about every programming cookie jar, including .NET, Scala, Python, and Ruby.
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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.
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Tim Pope
Tim is our loudest Rocketeer, which, when combined with his acerbic wit, results in a special blend of charming belligerence. Better known as tpope, he's authored several Vim plugins including the widely-used rails.vim and seldom misses a chance to promote the virtues of Git.
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Les Hill
Les has at various times been a founder, CTO, and a VP of Engineering, but his real passion is crafting software. He has done everything from developing self-organizing P2P networks to creating one of the earliest AJAX driven web applications. He has been a longtime practitioner of Agile development practices and believes that small, smartly managed and motivated teams are the way to outperform. He lives by the beach with his wife and their daughter.
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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. Oh yeah, and he worked at ClariFI.
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Wes Gibbs
Wes jumped on the Rails in 2007 to escape the malaise brought on by 10 years of writing big enterprisey code for big enterprisey clients. 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 lives in Neptune Beach, FL with his lovely wife Sarah and their two children, Alex and Abby.
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Stephen Caudill
Stephen, or "Vox Dolo", is easily the most rappinest (is that a word? no matter.) Rocketeer. When he's not challenging people to freestyle battles, he's challenging assumptions and innovating all up in your grill. Stephen has over a decade of experience working on the web (with the last five years spent using Ruby) and a background spanning multiple enterprises, languages and entrepreneurial ventures. Being both compulsively analytical and a lover of linguistics, Stephen's found a happy niche as a programmer, system architect and web generalist.
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Matt "Veez" 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.
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Andrew Maier
Andrew architects, designs, and implements web sites for a variety of clients and organizations. He teaches, authors, and speaks on topics pertaining to user experience, usability, and human-computer interaction. In 2008, he received his Bachelors of Science degree in Mathematics, with honors, from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since then, he has worked with a number of teams designing web interfaces and heading User Experience initiatives. His blog, the UX Booth, offers articles about crafting user experiences as well as periodic, community–driven evaluations of websites and services.
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Rogelio Samour
Born in El Salvador, Rogelio started tinkering with computers when his dad gave him a Tandy in the early Eighties. He received a degree from Arkansas Tech University in 2003 and is passionate about using Computer Science to solve complex problems. Things Ro thinks are rad: Vim, Ruby, Rails, Linux, Open Source, Quantum Leap, Murdock from "The A-Team," basketball, "MacGyver," "Seinfeld," "Monk," chess, and long walks on the beach (with his wife). He likes Middle Eastern cuisine and dislikes talking about himself in the third person.
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Adam Lowe
Adam spent a number of years working across the technology project life cycle in enterprise Microsoft environments. Frustrated with the old world’s pervasive status quo mentality, he discovered Ruby on Rails in 2007 which rekindled his love for Linux, OS X and software development. In 2008, he met the Rocketeers and was enamored with the passion, craftsmanship and drive to succeed with which they applied themselves. He joined the team in 2009 and relishes every opportunity to leverage his diverse background and utility belt of skills where ever he's needed.
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Paul Elliott
New Jersey native but raised in the south, Paul's interest in computers started with Pegasis on his Dad's Tandy CoCo in the early 80's. He tinkered with the internet through the second half of the 90's and earned a degree in Computer Science from the University of North Florida in 2004. Since 2002, he spent most of his career working on large enterprise Java web applications and does not miss it at all. Working with Rails and jQuery, surrounded by shiny Macs and a beautiful beach...it doesn't get much better than that!
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Doris Steere
Doris is an eternally optimistic, challenge-driven and goal-oriented visual designer that brings to the team a meticulous eye for detail and a preternatural ability to extract inspiration from her surroundings. With a broad set of professional experiences ranging from non-profit to freelance, large-scale portal to intimate agency, she’s adept at working on numerous projects of varying dimensions. When she’s not basking in the glow of her MacBook Pro, Doris can be found running, swimming, biking or competing in triathlons.
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Phillip Crawford
Philip "The Dude" Crawford started programming hex assembly language on the original Heathkit HERO robot back in the early 80s. His first career step out of college was as a management consultant specializing in Agile manufacturing strategy for the world's largest consultancy. The tech bubble of the late 90s brought him back to software. After years as a project manager using MSF, CMMI, and Agile methods, he left the corporate world to launch two successful SaaS web startups in 2005 and 2007. The Dude is into food, table tennis, snow boarding and heads the Hashrocket Labs initiative.
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Shay Arnett
Husband, father of two, and life long techie, Shay has been creating websites since the days when scrolling marquees and animated .gif backgrounds were cool. He started using Ruby in 2006 after getting tired of using PHP for developing internal projects in the health care industry. Shay used his spare time to build Rails apps for clients, as well contributing to open source, and developing his own pet projects, like the tweet embedding service Twictur.es. Shay left health care completely in 2008 to start a software consultancy. In between client projects, he spent some time doing iPhone development, releasing Cheat in 2009. He joined Hashrocket in 2009 and continues to love writing Ruby, and only mildly hating Objective C, to this day.
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Dennis Eusebio
Jacksonville born and raised, Dennis graduated from the University of Florida in 2004 with a degree in Graphic Design. He has experienced his fair share of advertising agencies and design boutiques throughout the years before starting his own successful web design firm Thought & Theory in 2006. Serving as Creative Director for Hashrocket, he's always looking for ways to express himself through design and technology. When not working (which is rare), Dennis enjoys DJ'ing, Photography, Cars and Film.
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Corey Grusden
Corey began writing online role playing game programs at the age of eight while he was "busy" in grade school. After taking one college class, he dropped out to become a full time developer in the "real world." At various times (and occasionally at the same time) he was a day trader, contractor for the DOD (with a security clearance), professional-level gambler, Unix administrator and software developer. For the last two years he has been a software developer for the #1 Ruby on Rails consultancy in the world.
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Robert Pitts
Robert[rbxbx] enjoys cats, aspartame, and hipster rubbish (but not _that_). He is currently having difficulties dealing with being a sellout fatcat, however 27" iMacs and new shoes are helping ease the transition. He's run a hardcore DIY underground (mostly) electronic net-label for around 6 years now, before Radiohead and NIN 'revolutionized' free music in the digital age. Merrr. Originally became interested in web-programming as a matter of utility, due to realizing the importance of a strong net-presence early on. From there, an interest in the MAX/MSP programming environment took that to another level, which finally culminated in programming bliss upon discovering _why(rip)'s Poignant Guide to Ruby (and thusly the Ruby programming language). There's been no looking back since then as being able to turn one's interests into a career is quite rare and amazing. Huzzah. You can find him arguing with your girlfriend at the local pub about her horrible taste in music. Hah hah, only serious.
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Josh Graham
Josh Graham is a crazy Aussie with over 20 years experience in the software industry (as many years as he's been drinking legally).
He has spoken at and chaired conferences on SOA, enterprise architecture, agile software delivery, and technology innovation.
After spending time on 5 continents during 2009 and wanting to "stay at home for a little bit", Josh opened the Chicago office of Hashrocket at the beginning of 2010 (although plans to still visit 5 continents in 2010).
Josh organizes speakerconf. You may have met Josh already at a bar.