WNY Ruby User Group

Kevin Baird has written a book called Ruby By Example, which has so far fooled some of the WNYRuby.com folks into thinking he has a clue. He also blogs at Squire of the λ Calculus, the title of which reveals both that he likes functional programming and that he can't name things very well. He has a Ph.D. in music composition, which comes in very handy for a programmer.

Patrick Hagerty (or PJ) is a Software Developer/Product Specialist at Academic Management Systems. He is new to Ruby.

Prior adventures have had PJ fighting in the land of Visual FoxPro 9.0, weilding the mighty ASP classic, and working on projects in straight up HTML. He's one of those dorks who loved notepad so much he still uses the sequel Notepad2.

Don't panic, he is getting familiar, though not yet intimate, with Apple products (besides his trusty sidekick iPod).

For adventures on the high seas, or to kick him and hear him sing a high C, PJ can be reached at pjhagerty at gmail dot com.

Mark is totally awesome. That’s pretty much all you need to know about him.

Wait… what? Oh? You want to know some more? Can’t see why you would, I mean, that one word pretty much sums everything up, doesn’t it?

Seriously? You’re going to butcher that poor Anna Karenina quote to say “Unawesome people are all alike; every awesome person is awesome in their own way.” What did Tolstoy ever do to you?

Okay, okay, here’s about me:

I’ve been doing Rails for about 3 years now, after convincing my coworkers that it’s a much better way to do things. As an undergraduate I was a quadruple major at UB, and then got a Master’s degree in Mathematics. (True Fact: I didn’t study any numbers less than infinity.) Now I work for a consulting company called Division By Zero (True Fact: That’s impossible, which is what we do the _.)

On the side I’m slowly working on a Flash framework for puzzle game development.

I have a blog at http://mcphage.com (new as of April 2008), and can be reached at mark@overnothing.com.

Bill has been working freelance since the late 90’s and has been using Ruby and Rails for the last 3 years. He has Undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics and a Masters degree in Mathematics.

Notable Fact: Bill spent time in the Marines and has trained in several martial arts and would love to fight Zed Shaw some day. Its not that he doesn’t like the guy and he’s never met him. It just seems like Zed really wants to fight someone. It might as well be someone who can fight back.