Instructors
Big Nerd Ranch allows only the most knowledgeable and eloquent instructors to teach our classes.
Jay Anderson
OpenGL instructor Jay Martin Anderson has done computer graphics for over 45 years, and has developed graphics applications for Hewlett-Packard and the former Tymlabs Corporation.
Having taught computer graphics at the university level for over thirty years, Jay has published a CD-ROM on computer cartography as well as a suite of teaching aids in computational geometry. He has taught in both the United States and Europe, and has been a Fulbright professor on three occasions (Brno, Vienna, Innsbruck).
Jay has lectured widely in the United States and Europe, especially on visualization with QuickTime movies. He is an Apple Distinguished Educator (class of 2001), and professor (emeritus) of computer science at Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster PA, USA.
Dave Beazley
Python Instructor David Beazley is the author of the Python Essential Reference and the developer of several open-source software development tools, including SWIG (a popular tool for integrating C/C++ programs with other programming languages including Python, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, PHP, and Java) and PLY (A Python version of the lex/yacc parsing tools).
Dave has been programming Python since 1996 and helped pioneer the use of Python with scientific computing software while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory. From 1998-2005, he was an assistant professor in the department of computer science at the University of Chicago where he taught courses in operating systems, networks, and compilers.
Dave has been active in the Python community for more than ten years, having given several conference presentations and tutorials on Python-related topics at both the Python conference and the O'Reilly Open Source Software Conference. Dave is currently a freelance software developer and musician living in Chicago.
Juan Pablo Claude
Django and Cocoa II Instructor Juan Pablo Claude is originally from Santiago, Chile and came to the US to attend graduate school in chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After earning his Ph.D., Juan Pablo became a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, teaching and doing research in the area of physical inorganic chemistry. In his research, Juan Pablo often had to write data acquisition analysis programs, leading to his interest in computer programming and technologies. After spending several years in academics, Juan Pablo decided to make a career out of computers. He joined the Big Nerd Ranch in late 2005 as a Cocoa and Django programmer.
Juan Pablo cut his teeth programming in C for PC's running DOS to squeeze data out of recalcitrant instruments during graduate school. He then moved on to write data analysis applications in C++ for Windows. When OS X was released he was immediately compelled to return to the Mac and he hasn't looked back since. These days, he is delighted to write Objective-C and Python code in such a cooperative platform.
Joe Conway
iPhone Instructor Joe Conway has been writing software on the Mac platform since he was a teenager. Originally wanting to become a game developer, Joe learned a wide variety of programming skills and cultural histories. Ironically, on the way back from his interview with the Big Nerd Ranch, two game developers sat behind him on the plane, griping about how little fun the game industry was. This solidified his decision to join the Big Nerd Ranch.
Joe quickly moved to Atlanta to begin consulting work for the Big Nerd Ranch after graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 2007, where he also competed as a long jumper for the track team. After being in Atlanta for a total of eleven hours, Joe had his first meeting and secured his first consulting project.
Joe still enjoys an occasional run, but most of the time you will find him at his computer with a pair of headphones on, trying to perfect whatever project he is currently infatuated with.
Mark Dalrymple
Advanced Mac OS X Instructor Mark Dalrymple, author of Advanced Mac OS X Programming, has been a Macintosh programmer since 1985 and a professional unix programmer since 1990.
On the Mac side of things, Mark has contributed to the AOL 3.0 client and was chief architect of an internal publishing tool that interfaced with both the Mac AOL client and the AOL proprietary publishing infrastructure, all using C++. On the unix side, he has contributed code and developer documentation to the Galaxy cross-platform toolkit (supporting more than 20 different unix platforms, as well as Windows, the Mac, and OpenVMS) using C and C++.
While at AOL, Mark was also technical lead for the AOLserver team. AOLserver is a web application server implemented in C and Tcl which collectively across all AOL web properties was handling tens of thousands of hits per second on many different unix platforms (Linux, HP, SGI, Digital Alpha, Solaris).
Mark Fenoglio
Objective-C and PHP/PostgreSQL Instructor Mark Fenoglio has over 12 years of experience in database and web-based application development in technologies ranging from SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and 4th Dimension to ASP, PHP, Ajax, Cocoa, and Objective-C. He was hired by the Big Nerd Ranch in September 2005 after asking too many annoying questions at the Cocoa Bootcamp that March.
To support his PHP development efforts, Mark has crafted his own PHP application framework. The framework features a PostgreSQL-friendly ORM and predicate library, a lightweight template-based rendering engine, and an innovative workflow approach to application design.
When not slaving away at his computer, Mark puts his Masters Degree in Geophysics from Stanford University to good use by pounding away at rock walls in quarries, searching for elusive treasures for his mineral collection. (Consequently, he never mocks anyone else's hobbies.)
brian d foy
Perl Instructor brian d foy has been teaching Perl since 1998. He is one of the authors of the O'Reilly books Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl.
brian founded the first Perl users group, the New York Perl Mongers, as well as the Perl advocacy non-profit Perl Mongers, Inc. which helped form over 200 Perl user groups across the globe. He maintains the perlfaq portions of the core Perl documentation, several modules on CPAN, and some stand-alone scripts. brian is the publisher of The Perl Review, a magazine devoted to Perl, and a frequent speaker at conferences including The Perl Conference, Perl University, MarcusEvans BioInformatics '02, and YAPC. His writings on Perl appear in The Perl Journal, Dr. Dobbs, and The Perl Review.
Matthias Fricke
Objective-C Instructor Matthias Fricke has more than 15 years experience in the IT sector. In the early 90s he worked for the German NeXT Distributor DART Software and co-founded later the WebObjects consulting company NetMatic Internet/Intranet Solutions.
Matthias spent more than 8 years in the US and worked in the last years at Apple as the Worldwide Training Delivery Manager. He moved back to Germany in 2007 and is now working for Assense Software Solutions in Hamburg. Since the end of 2007 he also teaches for Apple (EMEA) as a T3 (Train the Trainer) Instructor and prepares trainers to become Apple Certified Trainers for the Apple Certified IT classes.
Brian Hardy
Ruby Instructor Brian Hardy has been developing software in some form since the heyday of MS-DOS and QBasic. Fortunately, that era is now a distant memory, and he has spent the last decade professionally developing applications on and off the Web, for projects ranging from the tiniest shell script to massive content-driven web sites such as CNN.com.
With experience spanning many languages and platforms, Brian brings a well-seasoned blend of expertise to the classroom. His infatuation with Ruby was ignited with the release of Ruby on Rails, and he has since come to cherish the language as a model implementation of many powerful object-oriented and functional programming design patterns. In his opinion, making powerful software has never before been so much fun.
His passion for Linux and the Unix Way kept him from adopting the Mac platform until the release of OS X, which married a simple and beautiful user interface to industrial-strength underpinnings largely powered by open source software. Since then it has been his platform of choice for work and play.
As a natural extension of the Mac environment, Brian has lately devoted much of his time to mastering iPhone development, which brings the power and flexibility of programming on the Mac to the challenging and flourishing mobile arena. With an application in the store and more on the way, this promises to be an exciting new avenue for learning and instruction.
Carsten Haubold
OpenGL co-instructor Carsten Haubold studies Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt with a focus on computer graphics.
Being an active member in the OpenGL community since 2000, Carsten started with writing small game applications and is now one of the two developers working on and taking care of the famous NeHe OpenGL tutorials. Answering questions in the NeHe message boards every day, Carsten is familiar with a broad variety of issues graphics programmers might encounter
Carsten is also technical editor of the Book Beginning OpenGL Game Programming 2nd Edition which is the first book on OpenGL 3.0 to be published in early 2009. He has implemented NURBS modeling tools for K-3D during the Google Summer of Code 2008 program.
Aaron Hillegass
Cocoa Instructor Aaron Hillegass has over 18 years of experience as a software engineer and developer trainer. He wrote the Big Nerd Ranch course on Cocoa, drawing from his experiences working at Apple Computer, Inc. and NeXT Software, Inc. as the senior trainer and curriculum developer.
Aaron is the author of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. This book, published by Addison-Wesley, is generally regarded as "The Book" from which to learn Cocoa programming. He is also the co-author of Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming.
Aaron has developed and deployed very large systems using Cocoa, WebObjects, and/or PostgreSQL for clients including Cogent Design, Nortel Networks, and the United Parcel Service. He has taught at the University of Washington and the New College of Florida.
Patrick Lenz
Ruby on Rails Instructor Patrick Lenz has been developing web applications for more than 10 years. Founder and lead developer of the freshmeat.net software portal, he's nowadays running his own Rails consultancy, limited overload GmbH. He and his company have a track record for thoughtful deployment and scaling of innovative web applications on Rails.
On his < a href="http://poocs.net/>weblog, Patrick shares his experience and how-to-style articles for common and not-so-common endeavors in the every day life of a Rails developer.
Furthermore, Patrick is the author of Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications, its second edition Simply Rails 2 and the article series The Adventures of Scaling (with Rails) (poocs.net, 2006) as well as a comprehensive article about using the new Ruby debugger (SitePoint, 2007).
Mark Murphy
Android Instructor Mark Murphy brings to you 25 years of programming experience, and has served as a developer trainer and consultant for nearly two decades. He is the founder of CommonsWare and the author of The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development.
Mark has written training courses for CollabNet on open source licensing and the use of CollabNet's flagship SourceCast collaborative software development tools, delivered to firms such as Nokia, HP, Sun, and RealNetworks. As a developer, he has slung code on behalf of firms like FedEx and American Management Systems.
Mark has been involved with mobile development since the early days of the Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML) in 1996, his PageBlazer Web development IDE was the first to support creating applications that served both to the Web and to wireless devices.
Charles B. Quinn
Ruby on Rails Instructor Charles Brian Quinn is a freelance consultant and Partner at Highgroove Studios -- a firm providing custom web 2.0 development, and Ruby on Rails consulting. He is also a founder of Slingshot Hosting for Ruby on Rails business hosting, and an active member of the Ruby on Rails community. With experience in large-scale development and deployment of database-backed web applications, he brings practical and hands-on knowledge of real-word practices and patterns.
Charles previously taught as a Teaching Assistant at Georgia Tech for Introductory Computer Science, and as an Instructor for an enterprise-grade, service-enabled, legacy integration software and load testing/balancing suite to various Fortune 500 organizations such as Deloitte & Touche, Mutual of Omaha, AAA Mid-Atlantic, and Governmental Agencies such as the State of Tennessee, and the Municipality of Durban in South Africa. He holds a BS degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and resides in Atlanta, Georgia.
Scott Ritchie
Cocoa and iPhone Instructor Scott Ritchie has been developing with and teaching about Objective-C since he joined NeXT Computer in 1990. Prior to that time he was an engineer at Sun Microsystems working on window systems. Since 2000 he has held several training and engineering positions with Apple, most recently working with both AppKit and UIKit development.
Scott received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was introduced to Smalltalk-80. He hasn't wanted to work with a computer language that wasn't also an "environment" since. He went on to earn a Masters in Computer Science from UC Berkeley where he focused on the design of RISC-based multiprocessor architectures.
Matthew Russell
JavaScript/Ajax Instructor Matthew Russell is a tenacious technologist with entrepreneurial zeal. He has completed nearly 50 publications on technology, including work that has appeared or is upcoming in scientific conferences, Linux Journal, Apple Developer Connection, and
Matthew currently resides in Franklin, TN and serves Digital Reasoning Systems as the Director of Advanced Technology; in this role, he pushes the limits of user interfaces in the web browser and researches bleeding-edge topics in unstructured text mining for the company's flagship Synthesys platform. Matthew's professional consulting firm, Zaffra, pushes the limits of open web technology to deliver cost effective solutions to clients of all sizes and budgets.
Jeremy Sherman
Advanced Mac OS X instructor Jeremy W. Sherman graduated from New College of Florida in 2008 with a B.A. in Math/Computer Science and a thesis, lovingly crafted in LaTeX, titled "Compiling Imperative and Functional Languages."
Jeremy has been playing with programming and command lines since he got his hands on QBasic running under MS-DOS on an 8088. His first experience with a Unix system came while programming in LPC for an LPMud. He has been using Macs since Mac OS 9, made the jump to Mac OS X as soon as possible, and has had Terminal.app open since.
Alex Silverman
OpenGL Teaching Assistant Alex Silverman graduated from Georgia Tech in 2007 with a degree in Applied Physics.
He started developing for the iPhone in his free time while teaching physics at a large public high school in Gwinnett County, GA. Making iPhone applications quickly became Alex's passion so he decided to take his skill set to the next level with the Big Nerd Ranch.
With his background in secondary education, Alex is pursuing how the iPhone can be used in the classroom to enhance the learning experience. When he's not programming, Alex enjoys listening to music and reading on the web.
Alexander von Below
iPhone Instructor Alexander von Below has been a Macintosh enthusiast since 1985, and has been writing software for Macs about as long.
After graduating in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen, Germany, and more than ten years in the corporate software industry (e.g. Roxio), he became a freelancer in 2003. His experience ranges from Cocoa to device drivers, PCI cards, IOKit and the very core of OS X. Among his focus areas are Apple’s Developer Tools, including remote and two-machine debugging and utilizing the performance optimization tools.
Bob Walsh
MicroISV/Startup Bootcamp Instructor Bob Walsh is the author of Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality and co-moderator of the popular Joel on Software Business of Software forum.
A software developer for 25 years, Walsh has authored one microISV Windows desktop product and is busy working on a Software as a Service web-based application for microISVs and startups.