My name is Ed Ruder. I’ve been writing software for a very long time–I started learning BASIC when I was in grammar school (in the ’70s!), learned 6502 Assembly Language in high school, and took off from there!
A couple of friends–Randy Wigginton and Don Breuner–and I started a company out of college to write MacWrite for the Macintosh. (Actually, Don and I joined Randy in the startup–he had been working for Apple since we were in high school together, and he had the relationship with Steve Jobs.) That was exciting and fun–can you imagine writing a word processor in assembly language? Today, I can’t either!
That company was called Encore Systems, and later, The Software Department. We wrote a bunch of Macintosh software for different clients, including a spreadsheet–FullImpact, for Ashton-Tate–this time, in C++!
Later, I worked for Storm Technology, Intuit, Quigo Technologies, Hi5, and FanSnap/Nextag. Since 2012 I have been at Square, where I have been a Rails, EmberJS, iOS, and Java engineer, sometimes on the same project!
In case it’s not obvious that I’m a geek, let me confirm it–I’m a geek. I love to learn new technical skills, read about all kinds of interesting things, play with gadgets, and discuss any- and everything (whether I know anything about it or not).
I’ve toyed with the idea of having a blog for years, but haven’t taken the leap to creating one and start writing, until now. We’ll see how far it goes. I didn’t want to use any of the very good blogging systems out there, mainly because I wanted to build and host it “by myself.” While not strictly handmade (I’m using Jekyll behind the scenes and a slightly-customized version of the Lanyon theme), I like the control I get by hosting it on my own server, tweaking various parts of the source, adding features, etc.