Working With Rails

I’m the Founder and CEO the web development/Rails consultancy Logical Reality Design, and the CEO of music educational software startup Provectis Music, Inc..

Historically, I did web applications development in PHP/LAMP, but a friend convinced me to try Ruby on Rails four years ago and I’ve switched to it with a passion ever since then. For major development, anyway; I think PHP still has value in quick additions to sites that are otherwise mostly flat HMTL.

Outside of web development, my primary development experience is in Java. Call me crazy, but I actually still think there’s a place for Java in the development of desktop applications. And, even, that there’s still a place in the world for desktop applications, though it may not seem as hip anymore to the Web-2.0 generation of developers. But real-time signal analysis, including the work I’m doing with Provectis Music, Inc., is not something you do in a web applications or interpreted languages just yet.

I also have a passion for AI and boardgames, and am an active developer in the enthusiast community of the boardgame Arimaa. Arimaa was invented in the early 2000’s by a guy who was frustrated after watching Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in chess. Like Go, Arimaa has a high branch factor that makes typical brute-force search approaches difficult. There’s a prize for any programmer who can beat the top human player, currently at $17,000. So far, we aren’t close.

Education: I graduated from Swarthmore College in 1997 with a B.S. in Engineering and a B.A. in Biology, and from Caltech in 2005 with a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems.