Peter Cooper
peter@peterc.org (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious)
What
Peter Cooper is a husband, dad, computer scientist in training, mature math student (BSc Mathematics 2013 - erk.. I’ll be 32!), Ruby developer, successful author and editor, and semi-successful entrepreneur (two good exits, but not enough to retire on!)
News
- I’m speaking at Geekup Doncaster on September 22, 2010. Topic not yet decided.
- I’m considering doing a business/startup “tour” of California in the next few months to promote coder.io. If you run a startup or otherwise want to catch up, please get in touch.
Projects
- Ruby Inside - A blog about the Ruby programming language and associated technologies. Approximately 24,000 subscribers as of mid 2010.
- coder.io - My new startup focusing on aggregating news and links for software developers. Still not truly “launched” but you can check it out.
- Rails Inside - A blog about the Rails Web application development framework.
- RubyFlow - A community driven link blog for the Ruby and Rails communities.
Past Projects
- Code Snippets - A tagged code snippets site I built in 2005 and sold to DZone in 2007.
- Feed Digest (now Feed Informer) - Web feed manipulation and syndication service I launched in 2005 and sold to Vicman Technologies in August 2007. Users included NASA, The Denver Post, MIT, The Smithsonian Institution, and the US Department of Agriculture. Traffic was 250m requests per month. Update: I’ve written about the sale.
- Mobile Orchard - iPhone developer news blog and podcast co-founded with Dan Grigsby in 2008. I handed it over entirely to Dan in 2009 as I was no longer involved with iPhone development. He has since put it on hiatus.
- Switchpipe was a proof of concept Web application process manager and request proxy that made it easy to deploy persistent process Web applications such as Rails apps. It was superseded by Phusion Passenger but the code remains on GitHub for historical purposes.
- Editor of WebPedia.com which was acquired by Internet.com in 1999. I was then joint editor of Internet.com’s WebDeveloper.com until 2000.
- Editor of eboz.com in 1999 until it was acquired by iBoost.com in 2000.
Miscellaneous
- Author of Beginning Ruby, published by Apress (1st ed. 2007, 2nd ed. 2009.)
- Author of the “Indexing and Searching” chapter of Ruby In Practice, published by Manning in 2009.
- Referee of Controlling a Robotic Marine Environmental Sampler with the Ruby Scripting Language (Roman, Scholin, Jensen, Massion, Marin) for the Journal of the Association for Laboratory Automation.
- Technical reviewer of Design Patterns in Ruby (Russ Olsen), a book published by Addison-Wesley.
Interviews and Press
- Foundora Interview: Peter Cooper on Foundora, August 2010.
- TechZing #60: Peter Cooper on TechZing podcast, August 2010 [audio interview].
- coderpath 5: Peter Cooper on CoderPath podcast, May 2010 [audio interview].
- 30 minute radio slot/interview about the iPad on BBC Radio Lincolnshire, April 12, 2010.
- Peter Cooper: How to become a successful Rubyist by Dmitry Belitsky, October 2009.
- Peter Cooper谈Ruby是否将会流行 by 51CTO, September 2009.
- Will iPhone ‘orchard’ bear fruit? by Katharine Grayson for Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal, November 2008.
- Take Five: Questions with Peter Cooper for FiveRuns (now out of business), January 2008.
- Chatting with Peter Cooper by Fabio Akita, January 2008.
- Interview: Peter Cooper on Rails, Enterpreneurship, and Developing on Linux by Larry Wright, December 2007.
- Ruby Experts: Why They Are In Love With Ruby/Rails by Naveen Bala, December 2007.
- Advice for Ruby Beginners 1 by Satish Talim, September 2007.
- Peter Cooper on the Ruby on Rails Podcast, May 2007 [audio interview].
- How to find your angel investor by Michael V. Copeland for Business 2.0 Magazine, February 2006.
- Interview with Peter Cooper, author of Beginning Ruby for Apress, 2006.
- Interview with Peter Cooper by Ken Yarmosh, September 2005.
Talks
- Ignoring Common Sense: The Aircraft Carrier Made of Ice and Other Technical Flights of Fancy at Geekup Nottingham, August 1, 2010.
- Redis 101: A whirlwind tour of the next big thing in NoSQL storage at Hull Digital in Hull, England, June 24, 2010.
- Passion, Properly Pursued, and Why Journeys are Important at Think Visibility in Leeds, England, March 6, 2009 (review).
- Introduction to Ruby at Ruby Fools 2008 in Copenhagen, Denmark, April 1, 2008.
- Building a multi user dungeon in Ruby at Barcamp Manchester in Manchester, England, March 1, 2008.
Ambition
I keep track of my main ambitions on 43things. In terms of a “mission”, though, I want to make a significant contribution either in or by applying the fields of mathematics and computer science.