Working With Rails

Mark Bates has been developing web applications of one kind or another since 1996. He has spent an ungodly amount of time programming Java, but thankfully he discovered Ruby in late 2005, and life has been much nicer since. In 2011 Mark found CoffeeScript and his life got even nicer!

Since discovering Ruby Mark has become a prominent member of the community. He has developed various open source projects such as Configatron, Cachetastic, CoverMe, and the Mack Framework. In 2009 Mark authored the book “Distributed Programming with Ruby” for Addison-Wesley.

Since discovering CoffeeScript in 2011 Mark has become a leader in that community as well, through presentations at local user groups to releasing several high profile libraries, such as Deano.JS and CoffeeBeans. Mark is currently working on the book “Programming in CoffeeScript” for Addison-Wesley (due out in early 2012).

Mark has taught classes on both Ruby and Ruby on Rails. He has spoken at several Ruby gatherings, including 2008 and 2010’s RubyConf where Mark spoke about building distributed applications. Mark has also given presentations about CoffeeScript at several gatherings, including BostonRB.

In 2011 Mark launched the innovative applications FluxTracker.com (integrated issue, project, and error tracking) and TweetKO.com (bookmark and backup tweets).

Mark has an honors degree in Music from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. He still likes to rock out on the weekends, but set times are now 10PM and not 2AM.

He lives just outside of Boston with his wife Rachel and their sons Dylan and Leo.

Mark can be found at http://www.markbates.com and http://github.com/markbates.