OpenGL instructor Jay Martin Anderson has done computer graphics for over 45 years, and has developed graphics applications for Hewlett-Packard and the former Tymlabs Corporation.

Having taught computer graphics at the university level for over thirty years, Jay has published a CD-ROM on computer cartography as well as a suite of teaching aids in computational geometry. He has taught in both the United States and Europe, and has been a Fulbright professor on three occasions (Brno, Vienna, Innsbruck).

Jay has lectured widely in the United States and Europe, especially on visualization with QuickTime movies. He is an Apple Distinguished Educator (class of 2001), and professor (emeritus) of computer science at Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster PA, USA.

Python Instructor David Beazley is the author of the Python Essential Reference and the developer of several open-source software development tools, including SWIG (a popular tool for integrating C/C++ programs with other programming languages including Python, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, PHP, and Java) and PLY (A Python version of the lex/yacc parsing tools).

Dave has been programming Python since 1996 and helped pioneer the use of Python with scientific computing software while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory. From 1998-2005, he was an assistant professor in the department of computer science at the University of Chicago where he taught courses in operating systems, networks, and compilers.

Dave has been active in the Python community for more than ten years, having given several conference presentations and tutorials on Python-related topics at both the Python conference and the O'Reilly Open Source Software Conference. Dave is currently a freelance software developer and musician living in Chicago.

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.

Advanced Mac OS X Instructor Mark Dalrymple, author of Advanced Mac OS X Programming, has been a Macintosh programmer since 1985 and a professional unix programmer since 1990.

Mark has experience on the client side and server side, being a veteran of several startups, and larger technology operations like AOL and Google. On the back-end, he has been the technical lead for AOLserver, a high-performance web server handling tends of thousands of hits per second on many different unix platforms (Linux, HP, SGI, Digital Alpha, Solaris). On the client-side, he has worked with native Mac toolkits, helped in the construction of cross-platform toolkits, and currently has code running on millions of Macintosh desktops world-wide.

In addition to being the principal author of both "Advanced Mac OS X Programming", Mark is principal author of "Learn Objective-C on the Macintosh", and has been the technical reviewer for many Cocoa and iPhone titles with Apress. He is also the co-founder of CocoaHeads, the international Mac programmer's group, with chapters in 26 countries on five continents.

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.)

Objective-C Instructor Matthias Fricke has more than 15 years experience in the IT sector. In the early 90s he worked for the German NeXT Distributor DART Software and co-founded later the WebObjects consulting company NetMatic Internet/Intranet Solutions.

Matthias spent more than 8 years in the US and worked in the last years at Apple as the Worldwide Training Delivery Manager. He moved back to Germany in 2007 and is now working for Assense Software Solutions in Hamburg. Since the end of 2007 he also teaches for Apple (EMEA) as a T3 (Train the Trainer) Instructor and prepares trainers to become Apple Certified Trainers for the Apple Certified IT classes.

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.

OpenGL co-instructor Carsten Haubold studies Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt with a focus on computer graphics.

Being an active member in the OpenGL community since 2000, Carsten started with writing small game applications and is now one of the two developers working on and taking care of the famous NeHe OpenGL tutorials. Answering questions in the NeHe message boards every day, Carsten is familiar with a broad variety of issues graphics programmers might encounter

Carsten is also technical editor of the Book Beginning OpenGL Game Programming 2nd Edition which is the first book on OpenGL 3.0 published in April 2009. He has implemented NURBS modeling tools for K-3D during the Google Summer of Code 2008 program.

Aaron Hillegass is the CEO of Big Nerd Ranch, which he founded in 2001. He started programming at the age of 10 in the basement of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. At 19, Aaron took his first professional programming job with the Mitre Corporation in their Advanced Signal Processing Lab. He wrote the data structures library for Tower Eiffel, before leaving to work on Wall Street to help create mortgage-backed securities, a device that would, fifteen years later, bring our entire economy to its knees. Aaron was also a developer trainer at NeXT in 1995 - 1997. Shortly after NeXT was bought by Apple, Aaron left to start his own company.

In 2000 Aaron was asked to teach Apple engineers how to write apps for this new Operating System: Mac OS X. After spending the summer of 2000 volunteering at the Omega Institute in Rhineback, NY, he decided to apply the monastic idea of retreat to technical training; Big Nerd Ranch was born. BNR taught its first course in March of 2001. He crafted the class structures practiced at the Ranch and is currently working on design plans for the new Ranch, located in Atlanta, GA.

MacTech consistently names Aaron one of the top 25 most influential people in the Mac community. An accomplished speaker, Aaron has lectured at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), ApacheCon, and C4. He has given the keynote at all the "Voices That Matter" iPhone Developers Conferences. He also gave the keynote at BZMedia's iPhone/iPad DevCon.

Aaron is also a best selling author. "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" was published in December of 2001. "Cocoa Programming" is widely considered the Bible of Mac development. It is now in its fourth edition and has been translated into French, German, Korean, Japanese and Chinese. He is also the co-author of "Advanced Mac OS X Programming" and "iPhone Programming: the Big Nerd Ranch Guide". He was one of two developers who wrote topsXtreme, a orthodontic practice management system based on Cocoa and PostgreSQL. He has also written applications for UPS, Z-Systems, and Apple, among others. In 2009, Aaron wrote the popular campground mobile application Campwhere.

Aaron is often seen wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat in public. He lives with his wife and two sons in Decatur, Georgia.

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.

Legendary product engineer and World's Toughest Programmer Mike Lee (@bmf) has worked on apps for Alaska Airlines, Delicious Monster, Tapulous, United Lemur, Apple, and Nextive, producing such hits as Delicious Library, Tap Tap Revenge, Obama '08, and Apple's Mobile Store.

His goal is to save Madagascar, his blog is at mur.mu.rs, and he has the world's largest collection of plush prosimians. In his spare time he races cars, flies airplanes, plays guitar, drinks single-malt scotch, and surfs.

Mike is currently the Mayor of Appsterdam, the World Capital of App Development.

Objective-C and iOS instructor and consultant Steve Marriott (@RndPrecision) has been pushing bits for decades, starting as a young BASIC programmer with his TRS-80 Coco 1 in 1981. A graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a B.S. in Computer Science, Steve has held a variety of corporate IT roles in the telecomm, energy, healthcare, and financial services industries.

Smitten by Mac OS X while tinkering with audio recording tools on his first Mac in 2006, Steve developed an admiration for amazing products from Apple. Seeing his wife's first generation iPhone sealed the deal. Steve soon left the corporate IT management world behind to return to his passion of writing software, specifically for the iOS platform as an independent developer. Thirty years after his first program, he found his way to the Big Nerd Ranch.

When not teaching or writing software for the Big Nerd Ranch, Steve enjoys discussing topics of business and software engineering with his amazing wife, who just happens to be a software engineer too. He won't say who is the better hacker of the household.

Away from the computer he can sometimes be heard mangling metal tunes with his electric guitar. One listen makes it apparent he is not the Steve Marriott of Humble Pie fame.

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.

iOS instructor Norberto Ortigoza graduated from National Autonomous University of Mexico with a B.S. in Computer Engineering and a M.S. in Computer Science. He also studied Software architecture and Process improvement at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon.

Norberto started programming 20 years ago using Silicon Graphics, Sun and Cray computers. He started using NextStep and OpenStep since 1995 when he was system administrator at the Applied Mathematics and Systems Research Institute at UNAM. His first programming language was Smalltalk and after that, he has programmed mainly in C, Objective-C, Java, C#, Python, Ruby, F-Script and recently Clojure. He has also learned, used and taught WebObjects, PSP/TSP, Scrum, Extreme Programming, Crystal, and done software testing and software architecture in companies throughout Mexico.

Norberto is the co-founder of the CocoaHeads user group in Mexico City. He also founded Raku, a consulting company that has been creating mobile applications for US and Mexican companies.

When not coding, reading, speaking, or teaching, Norberto is training for the next marathon or mountain climbing. He can be followed on Twitter @hiphoox

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.

Ruby on Rails Instructor Charles Brian Quinn is a freelance consultant and Partner at Highgroove Studios -- a firm providing custom web 2.0 development, and Ruby on Rails consulting. He is also a founder of Slingshot Hosting for Ruby on Rails business hosting, and an active member of the Ruby on Rails community. With experience in large-scale development and deployment of database-backed web applications, he brings practical and hands-on knowledge of real-word practices and patterns.

Charles previously taught as a Teaching Assistant at Georgia Tech for Introductory Computer Science, and as an Instructor for an enterprise-grade, service-enabled, legacy integration software and load testing/balancing suite to various Fortune 500 organizations such as Deloitte & Touche, Mutual of Omaha, AAA Mid-Atlantic, and Governmental Agencies such as the State of Tennessee, and the Municipality of Durban in South Africa. He holds a BS degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

Cocoa and iOS Instructor Scott Ritchie has been developing with and teaching about Objective-C since he joined NeXT Computer in 1990. Prior to that time he was an engineer at Sun Microsystems working on window systems. Since 2000 he has held several training and engineering positions with Apple, most recently working with both AppKit and UIKit development.

Scott received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was introduced to Smalltalk-80. He hasn't wanted to work with a computer language that wasn't also an "environment" since. He went on to earn a Masters in Computer Science from UC Berkeley where he focused on the design of RISC-based multiprocessor architectures.

iOS instructor, Fernando Rodríguez was educated between Europe and the Americas (Spain, Switzerland, Chile, Brazil and El Salvador) and is fluent in Spanish, English, Portuguese and French. He studied Chemical Engineering before finding about computers and losing all interest in the real world.

His current obsessions are Cocoa Touch, Objective-C and the iOS ecosystem. However, in previous incarnations he was a Python/Django hacker, Smalltalker, and much to his regret, C++ monkey. As the wheel of samsara relentlessly turns, this humble nerd expects someday to reach Nerdvana and end up as a Lisp hacker.

Fernando is an active member of the Spanish speaking iOS community, speaking at conferences and participating in local interest groups. He also co-founded a software and consulting company in Madrid that has published retail software in the US, Brazil, and Spain.

When not coding or teaching Objective-C and Cocoa, Fernando is either spending time with his recently forked Fernando 2.0, or practicing his true passion: cooking.

Advanced iOS instructor Jonathan Saggau started intensely programming iPhone apps before the official SDK was even released. After hacking up a networked version of the video game Pong during a weekend long iPhone event he has not looked back. He is the founder and CEO of Sounds Broken Inc., a growing iOS and Mac OS X software contracting shop.

Jonathan is being increasingly recognized for his expertise architecting and coding high-performance iPhone applications. He has written on software development for Apress and IBM DeveloperWorks and been a speaker at a number of developer events, including three 360|idev conferences, both instances of iPhone/iPad Devcon, and iPhone Challenge Europe in Amsterdam. This fall he will travel to Bangalore, India to speak at Mobile Developer Summit India.

When he's not working on his car, flying airplanes or playing marimba, he writes a popular document reader for iOS called gogoDocs and he works with clients such as Random House, Fileblaze, topsOrtho, Vertitron, and the Big Nerd Ranch to develop outstanding products, services and processes. He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Music Composition, blogs at jonathansaggau.com and can be followed on Twitter @jonmarimba.

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.

iPhone Instructor Alexander von Below has been a Macintosh enthusiast since 1985, and has been writing software for Macs about as long.

After graduating in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen, Germany, and more than ten years in the corporate software industry (e.g. Roxio), he became a freelancer in 2003. His experience ranges from Cocoa to device drivers, PCI cards, IOKit and the very core of OS X. Among his focus areas are Apple’s Developer Tools, including remote and two-machine debugging and utilizing the performance optimization tools.

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.