Hal Fulton first began using Ruby in 1999. In 2001, he started work on The Ruby Way, which was the second Ruby book published in English. Fulton was an attendee at the very first Ruby conference in 2001 and has presented at numerous other Ruby conferences on three continents, including the first European Ruby Conference in 2003. He holds two degrees in computer science from the University of Mississippi and taught computer science for four years. He has worked for more than 25 years with various forms of UNIX and Linux. He is now at Simpli.fi in Fort Worth, Texas, where he works primarily in Ruby.
André Arko first encountered Ruby as a student in 2004, and reading the first edition of this book helped him decide to pursue a career as a Ruby programmer. He is team lead of Bundler, the Ruby dependency manager, and has created or contributes to dozens of other open source projects. He works at Cloud City Development as a consultant providing team training and expertise on Ruby and Rails as well as developing web applications.
André enjoys sharing hard-won knowledge and experience with other developers, and has spoken at over a dozen Ruby conferences on four continents. He is a regular volunteer at RailsBridge and RailsGirls programming outreach events, and works to increase diversity and inclusiveness in both the Ruby community and technology as a field. He lives in San Francisco, California.