About the Author

Obie Fernandez is a recognized tech industry leader and local celebrity in the Jacksonville business community. 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 moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1998 and gained prominence as lead architect of local startup success MediaOcean. He also founded the Extreme Programming (later Agile Atlanta) User Group and was that group’s president and organizer for several years. In 2004, he made the move back into the enterprise, tackling high-risk, progressive projects for world-renowned consultancy ThoughtWorks.

Obie has been evangelizing Ruby on Rails via online via blog posts and publications since early 2005, and earned himself quite a bit of notoriety (and trash talking) from his old friends in the Java open-source community. Since then, he has traveled around the world relentlessly promoting Rails at large industry conferences.

As CEO and founder of Hashrocket, one of the world’s best web design and development consultancies, Obie specializes in orchestrating the creation of large-scale, web-based applications, both for startups and mission-critical enterprise projects. He still gets his hands dirty with code on at least a weekly basis and posts regularly on various topics to his popular technology weblog, http://blog.obiefernandez.com.