iOS instructor Jonathan Blocksom is the Managing Director for the Big Nerd Ranch in Washington, DC, where he teaches classes to government customers and contractors. A native of Reston, VA, he has been programming since third grade. In addition to mobile software development, Jonathan also enjoys 3D graphics and computer vision, and has been programming in OpenGL since it was just little bitty gl.

Jonathan has worked for such notable companies as Silicon Graphics, SAIC, NFR, and Google. He also founded GollyGee Software, Inc., a small children's software developer that created the award-winning children's 3D modeler GollyGee Blocks. Jonathan received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.

Django, iOS, Cocoa II and Cocoa Española Instructor Juan Pablo Claude is originally from Santiago, Chile and came to the US to attend graduate school in chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After earning his Ph.D., Juan Pablo became a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, teaching and doing research in the area of physical inorganic chemistry. In his research, Juan Pablo often had to write data acquisition analysis programs, leading to his interest in computer programming and technologies. After spending several years in academics, Juan Pablo decided to make a career out of computers. He joined the Big Nerd Ranch in late 2005 as a Cocoa and Django programmer.

Juan Pablo cut his teeth programming in C for PC's running DOS to squeeze data out of recalcitrant instruments during graduate school. He then moved on to write data analysis applications in C++ for Windows. When OS X was released he was immediately compelled to return to the Mac and he hasn't looked back since. These days, he is delighted to write Objective-C and Python code in such a cooperative platform.

iOS Instructor Joe Conway has been writing software on the Mac platform since he was a teenager. Originally wanting to become a game developer, Joe learned a wide variety of programming skills and cultural histories. Ironically, on the way back from his interview with the Big Nerd Ranch, two game developers sat behind him on the plane, griping about how little fun the game industry was. This solidified his decision to join the Big Nerd Ranch.

Joe quickly moved to Atlanta to begin consulting work for the Big Nerd Ranch after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, where he also competed as a long jumper for the track team. After being in Atlanta for a total of eleven hours, Joe had his first meeting and secured his first consulting project.

Joe still enjoys an occasional run, but most of the time you will find him at his computer with a pair of headphones on, trying to perfect whatever project he is currently infatuated with.

Objective-C and PHP/PostgreSQL Instructor Mark Fenoglio has over 12 years of experience in database and web-based application development in technologies ranging from SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and 4th Dimension to ASP, PHP, Ajax, Cocoa, and Objective-C. He was hired by the Big Nerd Ranch in September 2005 after asking too many annoying questions at the Cocoa Bootcamp that March.

To support his PHP development efforts, Mark has crafted his own PHP application framework. The framework features a PostgreSQL-friendly ORM and predicate library, a lightweight template-based rendering engine, and an innovative workflow approach to application design.

When not slaving away at his computer, Mark puts his Masters Degree in Geophysics from Stanford University to good use by pounding away at rock walls in quarries, searching for elusive treasures for his mineral collection. (Consequently, he never mocks anyone else's hobbies.)

Ruby, iOS, and Android Instructor Brian Hardy has been developing software in some form since the heyday of MS-DOS and QBasic. Fortunately, that era is now a distant memory, and he has spent the last decade professionally developing applications on and off the Web, for projects ranging from the tiniest shell script to massive content-driven web sites such as CNN.com.

With experience spanning many languages and platforms, Brian brings a well-seasoned blend of expertise to the classroom. His infatuation with Ruby was ignited with the release of Ruby on Rails, and he has since come to cherish the language as a model implementation of many powerful object-oriented and functional programming design patterns. In his opinion, making powerful software has never before been so much fun.

His passion for Linux and the Unix Way kept him from adopting the Mac platform until the release of OS X, which married a simple and beautiful user interface to industrial-strength underpinnings largely powered by open source software. Since then it has been his platform of choice for work and play.

As a natural extension of the Mac environment, Brian has devoted much of his time to mastering iPhone development, which brings the power and flexibility of programming on the Mac to the challenging and flourishing mobile arena. With an application in the store and more on the way, this promises to be an exciting avenue for learning and instruction.

iOS and Android consultant and instructor Bolot Kerimbaev is originally from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. He came to the US to study computer science and received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Georgia Tech. Bolot has been developing web applications for over 14 years using Smalltalk, ColdFusion, Java, and even his own web server. In addition to code-fu, Bolot also teaches Taido Karate at Georgia Tech.

iOS consultant and instructor Christian Keur graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Computer Science. Like many others at the Ranch, Christian initially focused his efforts on game development and design. However, his love of Apple products enticed him to work at an Apple Retail store and his focus shifted to iOS development for both commercial and enterprise apps. When not building apps for our clients or teaching one of our courses, Christian is working on becoming an accomplished Android and OpenGL programmer.

iOS and Android instructor Owen Mathews comes to Big Nerd Ranch following a decade of work in education: two years in the Peace Corps in West Africa teaching math, and then eight years working as an educational technologist and computer science teacher at The Lovett School in Atlanta, GA. Prior to that he worked for three years as a software engineer.

Owen started programming in BASIC on an Atari 2600 and an Apple IIe and has been hooked ever since. He considers programming to be the perfect blend of structure, creativity and elegance—as much an artistic pursuit as painting or sculpture. At Lovett he sought to provoke the same inspiration in his 6th through 12th grade students by creating projects in Logo, Scratch and Java. He made his first foray into independent development with an iPhone app in 2009, and was pleased to find iOS a fun and rich environment for expressing his ideas.

Owen is a lifelong singer, and has sung for 10 years with the Atlanta Symphony Chorus—a gig that has taken him to Carnegie Hall and won him a Grammy (shared by 300 co-musicians). More recently he has been exploring some jazz open-mic opportunities around Atlanta. Soccer is his drug of choice; he gets his fix as many times a week as possible. He is an avid cook, especially if he can host a dinner party. His dog is a beagle mix named Ollie, and he is working on teaching him programming so that Ollie can join him at work every day.

Bill Phillips is an iOS (iPhone/iPad) consultant, Android consultant, and Android instructor who graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in Computer Science. He has written calculator games in high school math class. He has graphed gantry control hardware logs. He has ripped apart and put back together electronic document databases. He has mapped, aligned, and analyzed oil and gas pipeline inspections. There is little that Bill will not tackle given a bit of prompting.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Bill has been busy at Big Nerd Ranch. He has developed projects on both Android and iOS, and has co-written our Android course materials. He is also the co-author of Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, which is scheduled for publication this winter.

Bill has written production code in Python, C, C#, Java, and VB6, on Linux, Windows, and Mac. He is fond of wiener dogs and book reading. In his spare time he makes, modifies, or destroys the following: music, food, vacuum tube amplifiers, and electric guitar stomp boxes.

Mac and iOS consultant Adam Preble has been writing software professionally ever since he graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. While Adam has long had a passion for creating great desktop application user experiences, in particular on the Mac using Cocoa and Objective-C, he frequently finds himself writing system level code for such arcane tasks as MPEG stream demultiplexing, custom RPC architectures, or writing a server capable of handling many thousands of concurrent connections.

Adam's keen interest in game development – he has two games in the App Store – combined with his love for pinball has resulted in his creating pyprocgame, a pinball software development framework written in Python for use on real live pinball machines.

Advanced Mac OS X instructor Jeremy W. Sherman graduated from New College of Florida in 2008 with a B.A. in Math/Computer Science and a thesis, lovingly crafted in LaTeX, titled "Compiling Imperative and Functional Languages."

Jeremy has been playing with programming and command lines since he got his hands on QBasic running under MS-DOS on an 8088. His first experience with a Unix system came while programming in LPC for an LPMud. He has been using Macs since Mac OS 9, made the jump to Mac OS X as soon as possible, and has had Terminal.app open since.

iOS consultant and instructor Alex Silverman graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in Applied Physics. He started developing for iOS when the first SDK launched in March 2008. Since then, Alex has released over a dozen apps in the App Store in a variety of categories including games, education, and corporate branding. Several of his apps have made it to the front page of the App Store, and collectively they have been downloaded over 300,000 times.

Brian Turner's engineering talents expand to both the iOS and Android platforms. Brian began sticking his nose in programming books at the age of 10 and now brings his years of expertise to both our consulting clients and our students.

Brian admits to a profound love for all things Apple, which was cemented after 5 years of working as an Apple Specialist. His love for the iOS platform is what eventually lead him to Big Nerd Ranch.

When Brian is not working at the Ranch, he can be found rock climbing, bike riding, or working on his own personal projects.

iOS Instructor and Consultant Michael Ward comes to the Ranch from behind Apple's Genius Bar, where he spent innumerable hours fixing the Macs he so loves. Mikey brings a mixed background to the team, having received his Bachelor's in Neuroscience from Emory University, and recent work experience as both an EMT-I and Mac Genius.

Mikey's true passion throughout life has been programming ever since he first learned how to boss computers around with QuickBASIC almost 20 years ago, having since worked with C, C++, PHP and Objective-C. He also organizes the Atlanta Chapter of CocoaHeads, a worldwide group devoted to discussion of Apple's Cocoa Framework for programming on Mac and iOS devices.

When not at the keyboard, Michael is likely to be out hiking, fishing or otherwise enjoying the Georgia outdoors.

iOS consultant, Thomas Ward, started programming on the Commodore 64 many moons ago, where he taught himself BASIC. Throughout his programming career, he has worked on various different platforms. He spent the last ten years on internal tools for a web hosting company. Thomas graduated with honors from Florida Atlantic University with a B.S. in Computer Science.