It's the question everyone who works with her wants an answer to: How can Patti be so seriously awesome? This woman does it all: project management, programming, design, has created a successful startup, has run Ignite events on both sides of the coast, and she can cook up a mean braised pork belly. In this week's Intridea Insider meet Patti Chan!

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Hao grew up in Qingdao, a large seaside city situated in the Shandong Province of China. He is currently living in Qingdao again after spending several years in Beijing working for Red Hat and Oak Pacifics, applying his computer science education and initiating his open-source devotion. Read more…

He first learned to program on the side of an extinct volcano, trained in the Suzuki method from a young age, and describes Ruby as "mana from heaven." This week, in the Intridea Insider, meet Sean Soper, Software Architect at Intridea.

Sean first started programming during the time he spent living on the side of an extinct volcano in Naples, Italy when he was twelve years old. "My Dad was a civilian contractor for the Navy. We didn't live on base, but on the side of this old volcano. There were no other kids around." When his parents bought an old Packard Bell PB500, "with a 8088 processor", he spent a lot of time with the computer for lack of other entertainment. "The installed apps bored me pretty quickly so I started writing my own. I probably read the entirety of GORILLA.BAS at least five times, which was significant given that it was about 5000 lines of code."

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In a country where people can't get internet access until college, and computers are not household items, a disciplined self-learner discovered his passion for computers and technology despite his own circumstances. In this week's Insider, read about Senior Engineer, Xue Yong Zhi.

Yong grew up in Beijing, China where he spent his youth studying to be able to get into a good college. In his free time he took joy in reading comic books like Doraemon and Dragon Ball, and dreamt of one day becoming a comic book writer. Yong didn't have access to computers or the internet until college, and says that, "even in my generation in China, this still was early." Studying hard in school and performing well on college admission exams afforded him the opportunity to attend one of the few colleges in China that had internet access.

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She began college coursework at the age of 15, practices the Brazilian art of capoeira, and started her career by organizing fundraising events for political campaigns. She's part of the virtual glue of our company. In this week's Intridea Insider, meet Amelia Saletan, one of our champion Executive Assistants.

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Tom, now a Software Architect at Intridea, has spent most of his adult life programming in Java in the Banking and ECommerce industries. As Ruby developers who have already been shown the "Ruby way", we comprehend how stodgy that world must have been for Tom. So when he discovered Grails, and eventually Ruby and Rails, he did what most of us would expect a Ruby neophyte to do: he went to his (Java) development team and proselytized. "I was never able to rally enough support in the development team which was composed of all Java developers. No one wanted to learn a new language. So I ended up learning and playing with Rails on the side."

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Not far from a real Magical Kingdom, in the enchanting city of Orlando, lives a great programmer by the name of Jeremy McAnally. By day he codes in Ruby; by night he engineers patterns for his wife's clothing design venture. And in betwixt he writes books on Ruby and Rails, manages a seriously good blog, releases Ruby libraries, and organizes Ruby conferences, bringing together the great minds of the language that he loves. But before I go off on how brilliant this guy is, let me back up and introduce you to a much younger Jeremy McAnally, of Huntsville, Alabama.

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Ping came on board with Intridea during our infancy. He was employee #4, and has been part of the vision and culture of our company from the beginning. He has helped to grow Intridea from a group of four guys working at their dining room tables, to a company of 40+ Ruby and Rails developers and designers that span continents and multiple time zones. His work as Director of Asian Operations aims to bridge our Asian team of Rubyists with our centralized team in the states. "I believe in helping to extend Intridea into China. There is so much talent in China, it feels like a natural thing to do. Intridea has a culture of quality, and I want to bring that to these developers. They love Ruby, and they have so much energy."

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Ray really understands the dynamic of the client relationship. He talked with me about the importance of understanding where a client is coming from and noted that oftentimes the client knows what they want, but they don't have the technical knowledge to understand the process that must be taken to bring about their desired results. "It's important to explain our technology decisions and talk them through how the code works if that is what they need. Clients hire us because they don't know how to do this themselves. It's the same reason that I hire someone to do my landscaping; it's not that I'm ignorant and couldn't learn to do it myself, but I am using the time I save to do other things that I am good at. So when I respond to clients, I try to be specific and encouraging so that they understand that we are here to help them, not laugh at them. I think that is an important understanding for us to have."

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Pots draws inspiration from several sources, with an overall approach to design shaped by the writings of the author and comparative mythology scholar Joseph Campbell. "The goal with the Intridea redesign was to incorporate the spirit of the old site (the grass, trees, and sky), while simultaneously incorporating design elements from Michael's most recent design (the fuchsia, beige, etc)."

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As our internal open source pioneer, Michael spends a lot of time focusing on creating these open source tools. But he doesn't just create open source solutions; he also points out that he uses dozens of open source projects every day. It might sounds like a high number, but Michael explains, "Anyone who develops for Rails is using a ton of open source projects. Every gem in your Rails app is someone's hard work, sweat and tears." Michael contends that more developers should make time to develop or work on open source software. "I've always wanted to give a sort of open source cheerleader talk at one of these conferences. It's so easy, there's no reason everyone can't do it."

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Almost every idea I've come up with has been a result of needing a solution to a problem that wasn't already solved, or because I thought I could accomplish something better.

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But his engineering skills were first born and cultivated through building with Legos, long before he ever touched a computer or gaming console. Like many software engineers he had a curiosity for understanding the mechanics of how things worked from a very young age.

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We are very excited to announce the “Intridea Insider”, a new blog series that will profile a new Intridean every week. Visit us every Thursday to get a detailed interview with a team member, and discover everything from their favorite gems and productivity apps to their favorite coffee spots and blogs. 

This week’s featured Intridean is Joe Grossberg! 

Like many geeks, Joe grew up liking dinosaurs and computers. It wasn’t until he met the web in 1994 though, that he had a real reason to favor one over the other.

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