Obie Fernandez

Obie Fernandez is the CEO and founder of Hashrocket, Inc., a boutique web consultancy and product shop based in Jacksonville Beach, FL. Obie has specialized in Java enterprise development for most of his 12-year professional career as a software developer, with extensive experience writing web-based applications and leading Agile development teams. As a senior consultant for three years at ThoughtWorks, Obie was involved in complex custom enterprise software projects. ThoughtWorks leadership and reputation in the enterprise development world is firmly established.

Obie discovered Ruby on Rails in February 2005 and immediately detected a mix of timing, marketing, and sheer innovation that reminded him of Java during its early days of enterprise adoption. He began learning and evangelizing Rails internally at ThoughtWorks and publicly via his blog and public speaking engagements. In the process, he cultivated a friendship with David H. Hansson, the author of Rails and became heavily involved in the Rails community. Obie introduced David in person to a number of ThoughtWorks executives including CEO Roy Singham in March 2005, leading to the decision by ThoughtWorks to strongly support the nascent Rails community and encourage adoption of Ruby in the enterprise. By July 2005, Obie managed to transition over to Ruby as his primary programming language and led the first billable Ruby projects at ThoughtWorks. Due in great part to Obie's leadership, ThoughtWorks in 2007 is the world's leading Ruby consultancy, employing close to a hundred Rails developers worldwide, including some of the world's top Rubyists.

Members of the worldwide Ruby on Rails community know Obie due to his popular blog, reaching thousands of subscribers. Many of his blog entries about Rails receive hundreds of visits a month via Google searches and all of his websites are all highly ranked on searches for Ruby and Rails. Obie is also a regular contributor to the popular Ruby on Rails podcast and is the Ruby community editor at InfoQ.com, one of the web’s premier technology portals.