The Geezer is Dean Pannell, aka dinotrac.
His long strange trip through computing began in high school, punching WATFOR onto cards for the IBM 360 at Rutgers. His professional start came in the grueling Systems Engineering Development program at Electronic Data Systems.
From capacity planning and performance analysis to software development, project management, technical writing, system administration and classroom instruction, he’s never forgetten one basic principle: Software is written to meet the needs of the people who use it. It is developed for a purpose.
Career highlights include patents earned for the load-balancing dispatcher in a nationwide virtual call center router, and traveling to Europe to present seminars he had developed for voice application developers on a switching platform that was itself still under heavy development. Agile development? Try twitchy.
It’s mostly Ruby on Rails these days, after a progression through perl/CGI, perl/mod_perl, PHP, and, especially, Zope/python.
He gravitated to ruby because it’s a natural descendant of perl. Though very different, each seeks, in its own way, to make programming feel natural. As Matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto, ruby’s developer) put it:
Ruby is designed to make programmers happy.
Rails was a more practical matter. After years of working in places and incrementally discovering great work done by predecessors, the Geezer appreciates that Rails is more than a piece of technology. The “rails way”, from its aggressive support for agile development to its emphasis on convention over configuration, creates a sort of Universal Corporate Culture that gives Railhands a leg up on development and maintenance.
