Instructors
Big Nerd Ranch allows only the most knowledgeable and eloquent instructors teach our classes.
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.
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.
Rocco Bowling
OpenGL Instructor Rocco Bowling has been developing OpenGL software since the Classic Mac OS era. His OpenGL applications have received numerous awards and accolades, including two Apple Design Awards for Best Mac OS X Product and Best Mac OS X Technology Adoption. Rocco has partnered with game publishing powerhouse Freeverse Software to release two commercial entertainment titles. He is also a regular participant in the annual uDevGame Mac Game Programming Contest, where he applies his knowledge to create unique games.
Rocco has spent the previous few years performing advanced OpenGL visualization research for the National Security Agency. From networks to news, Rocco has applied his ingenuity and programming prowess to solving some of the world's most unique visualization problems.
Juan Pablo Claude
Django 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 has never looked back ever 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 took 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 is the author of Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming and 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 co-locates and manages a Linux server, and is also the author of the BOLTS technical columns at MacEdition.
Mark Fenoglio
PHP Bootcamp and Objective-C Instructor Mark Fenoglio has over 10 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.
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. (This activity is why he never mocks anyone else's hobbies.) A passionate Chicago Cubs and Penn State fan, Mark enjoys playing any sport where someone keeps score.
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.
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
WebObjects, Cocoa and Mac OS X 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 spend 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.
Stacey Goff
Ruby Instructor Stacey Goff has a BS in mathematics from New College of Florida. She developed an interest in programming through modeling mathematical problems in C++ and Matlab. Stacey has worked as a Ruby on Rails consultant for Big Nerd Ranch since August 2007.
Carsten Haubold
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.
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 weblog, poocs.net, 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 Application (SitePoint, 2006), its second edition Simply Rails 2 (SitePoint, 2008) 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.
Guido Neitzer
Real-World WebObjects instructor, Guido Neitzer, has been developing with WebObjects since he started using OpenStep with the "Prelude to Rhapsody" version in 1997. He has designed and built a wide-range of enterprise level applications in both Germany and Canada and is an active contributor to the widely used framework, Project WONDER.
As co-founder of Big Nerd Ranch Europe, he is excited to bring Europeans that same learning experience that the Big Nerd Ranch is famous for in the US.
Guido recently moved from Germany to the cold prairies of Canada to seek new challenges. Currently employed as Senior WebObjects Engineer and developer trainer for ClickSpace Interactive in Calgary, Guido is responsible for developing customer-centric e-commerce and portal applications with high visibility and business critical workflows.
When he's not working on various development projects, he enjoys listening to all kinds of "good" music. Naturally, he also enjoys hiking in both Banff and Jasper National Parks, near his new home in the Rocky Mountains.
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. He 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.
Matthew Russell
JavaScript/Ajax Instructor Matthew Russell is a tenacious technologist with entrepreneurial zeal. He has completed more than 40 publications on technology, including work that has appeared or is upcoming in scientific conferences, Linux Journal, Apple Developer Connection, and Make: Magazine. His most recent publication, Dojo: The Definitive Guide, is a 500-page tome dedicated to an industrial strength JavaScript toolkit. Matthew also maintains the online compendium for his book.
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. As a consultant, Matthew especially enjoys putting open web technology (especially Dojo and Python) to work to deliver cost-effective solutions to clients.
Randal L. Schwartz
Randal L. Schwartz is a two-decade veteran of the software industry. He is skilled in software design, system administration, security, technical writing, and training. Although you may know Randal from his career in Perl, he actually started in Smalltalk. He's a frequent speaker on Smalltalk and Seaside, and a board member of the Squeak Foundation. You can follow his Smalltalk activity on his "Methods and Messages" blog. Randal has owned and operated Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. since 1985. You can reach Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com. He welcomes questions on Perl, Smalltalk, and other related topics.
Alexander von Below
Alexander von Below has been a Macintosh enthusiast ever since 1985, and has been writing software for it 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 performace 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.