Personal
My name is Chris Joakim. I live in Davidson, NC, with my wife Theresa, and cat Maybelline.
I've been a software developer since 1986. Over the years, my primary programming languages have been
COBOL,
Smalltalk,
Java,
Flex,
ActionScript,
and now
Ruby.
I have a particular interest in software application frameworks and code generation, which enable
greater developer and team productivity. I've seen and used both excellent, and, unfortunately,
very poorly written vendor frameworks. While serving as the lead software developer at
Lowes.com in 2001, I developed the Java-based LKN framework,
which is still in wide use at Lowes in 2009.
Smalltalk introduced me to the beauty, simplicity,
and power object-oriented programming.
Eleven years as a
Java
developer enhanced my OO knowledge and skills. However, after working with Java
for a decade, I found its beauty and simplicity to be diminishing as vendor tooling, products, and
libraries became ever-more bloated, complex, and expensive. EJB and RAD7 are examples of this.
How could this platform, born of the simplicity of the unix environment, have grown so fat and ugly?
In January 2006 I first heard of the
Ruby programming language,
and the
Ruby on Rails application framework.
I read the
Pickaxe Book immediately.
Here I found a language with the beauty of Smalltalk, my first OO love, but with open classes and the ease of
text-file based deployment. The more I work with the language, the more I am impressed with its power, expressiveness,
and openness. Rails, meanwhile, is simply the best applications framework I've ever seen - by a wide margin.
Together, Ruby on Rails, is, in my opinion, the most interesting and productive programming environment
on the planet for web development. I've been fortunate to have worked professionally with "RoR", as Ruby on Rails
is know, since January 2008.
I've always been somewhat athletic. As the son of a Belgian, I found great interest in soccer through
my college years, then in bicycle racing in my 20's. After moving South from New England, I transformed
into a runner. I ran my first marathon at age 41, and have run 16 to-date. I also dabble in triathlon.
I find that the disciplines of athletic training, technical training, and software development are
mutually beneficial as they teach persistence and hard work.
I've also always been interesting in maps. I'd spend hours pouring over USGS topographical maps of New England
to plan my next ride, hike, or run. After doing events organized by others, I often asked myself:
'Where exactly have I been? Where were we?'. The confluence of my interests in Ruby, maps, GPS, affordable
GPS devices from Garmin, and the creation of Google mapping API's led to the creation of my open source mapping
software called
Gooby (Gooby = Google APIs + Ruby).
I'm a great fan and user of open-source software. The
bazaar
of the open-source communities usually offer better software than the "cathedral" of proprietary, overly-complex,
and overly-priced vendor software. As I write software to meet my own personal needs, and if I feel others may benefit
from it, I strive to make it available as open-source.
Quickin is an example of this.
I hope to write significantly more open-source software in the future.
