Anthony Eden’s answers to the erubycon interview questions make up the third installment in this series.

Anthony Eden Answers

Anthony Eden has more than 10 years of experience developing web applications, first with Perl, then Java and now Ruby on Rails. Anthony has developed numerous open source projects over the last 5 years in both Java and now in Ruby. Anthony is currently a project manager and technical lead with Camber Corporation, a government contractor and runs his own company, Aetrion LLC, a data warehouse development company.

Here are Anthony’s answers:

Q: Tell me a little about your background, where you are working and how did you come to start using Ruby?

I am a software developer/project manager with Camber Corporation, a 1400-employee consulting company that services the military and US Government as well as other nations. I also run my own business on the side developing Ruby-based data warehouse solutions for small businesses. I began with Perl in ‘95, started using Java in ‘96, used Python along the way and am now doing Ruby almost exclusively (except for some interest in Erlang). I came to Ruby via Rails and I was skeptical at first, but within a couple of months of using Ruby I became convinced that it could greatly improve my productivity, my team’s productivity and the overall joy of developing software.

Q: What unique opportunities do you see for Ruby in the enterprise?

The prime opportunity is to reduce the amount of code and amount of effort that goes into operating and maintaining various systems used to support Enterprise organizations. The larger an application is the harder it is to maintain. My hope is that the elegance of the Ruby language is seen as an enabler for smaller, easier to maintain enterprise applications that work together, rather than monolithic beasts that can’t be integrated.

Q: What obstacles do you see to getting Ruby used more in enterprise software?

Lack of quality documentation about Ruby and its associated libraries, that is easy to find, for one. Development tools are still an issue, but I actually see Ruby as a catalyst for new development tools that can take advantage of the dynamic nature of scripting languages, rather than something which is seen as an obstacle.

Q: Play oracle for a moment and tell me what you see as the next “Big Thing” in software development.

Distributed parallel processing. A few days with Erlang opened my eyes to the potential of direct support for parallel processing in a language and made me realize that parallel processing is going to be the only way to process the huge amount of data that is becoming available thanks to the “opening up” of a lot of web sites. Google and Amazon are really leading the way here and are representative of where we can go with applications and data integration on a large scale.

Q: What erubycon talk are you most interested in hearing?

- Ruby on Rails with Large Teams

- Stretching ActiveRecord

Thank You

Thanks Anthony.

For more information on the conference, see erubycon.com.