Jim Weirich joins EdgeCase
Back in 2003 / 2004 I was part of a really cool user group down in Cincinnati; xp-cinci. We were actively developing a product written mainly in Java, except for this little part of it that was being handled in some obscure language. I was introduced to Jim and really struck at how excited he was about this language called Ruby. I asked him to what the language was all about. So he brings me over to this laptop that … well let’s just say it wasn’t new. He fires up a window manager for Linux that I have never seen before and fires up emacs. Doing what every self-respecting Java developer would do when being shown something outside of an IDE, I blew him off.
About four months later every email to Jim began with “I’m so sorry I did no take you seriously, but I have a question …” I finally understood the infectious nature of this language. Ever since I have become good friends with Jim and watched as he helped the community transform this obscure language into what it is today. How has he helped?- working at a hotel bar with a jump drive for a CVS repository with David, Paul, Chad and Rich to develop Ruby Gems.
- Complaining about make on a white board and creating Rake
- Giving us one of the coolest demonstrations of Ruby’s DSL ability with Builder
- Helping us test better with flexmock.
as well as many, many other contributions.
Late last week, Jim accepted an offer to come to EdgeCase. Jim is going to help us increase our training as well as the obvious ability to add to our development arsenal. Our mission of helping spread Ruby into the world at large fits perfectly with Jim’s personality. Jim brings with him, not only an unmatched passion for Ruby, but also a great deal of enterprise experience.
