Brian Hardy

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.