About
Jeremy's interest in computers started in the mid 80s, when he was introduced to a Commodore 64 and by the late 80s, he was spending far too much time at the computer. Jeremy was a regular reader of Compute! magazine throughout the late 80s, and learned Basic and Pascal both by trial and error, as well as typing in the Compute! code samples.
By the early 90s, Jeremy was fairly proficient at Basic and Pascal, and continued to learn through writing small applications to solve problems for small companies, while balancing being a middle school student.
The mid 90s brought the BBS (Bulletin Board System) era, and Jeremy fell into it head first. He joined several local BBSs in Grand Rapids, Michigan and continued programming through writing scripts for games, affectionately called "scripting".
In 1996, Jeremy was recognized for being proficient with computers while he was a freshman in high school, and encouraged to dual enroll. Though initially there was the possibility that Jeremy might have to take the GED to be accepted to college at the age of sixteen, that crisis was averted and Jeremy dual enrolled in Grand Rapids Community College doing Visual Basic in early 1996.
Around the same time, Jeremy started to get involved in the emulation scene and became an active member of efnet's #emu channel. This exposed Jeremy to both C/C++ and x86 assembler. Turbo Assembler was his assembler of choice, running in "IDEAL" mode, and Turbo C++ was his C compiler of choice, though Delorie's DJGPP was also a popular option at that time.
The late 90s saw Jeremy graduate from high school, and start work at Amway on their Quixtar project. Initially Jeremy was hired as technical support, though he ended up being involved in testing and Intranet development.
In early 2000s, Jeremy started work doing support and development at Global Forex Trading, an Ada, Michigan based Forex market maker. Jeremy's achievements there included building a Java based real-time quote board, an intranet, and a few desktop applications. Jeremy wore many hats at Global Forex and he longed to write code all day, in a collaborative environment.
In late 2003, Jeremy interviewed with Fusionary Media, a small development shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was fortunate enough to be offered a job. Over the next three years, Jeremy would write a little Coldfusion, a lot of PHP, and a lot of Ruby, mostly using the Rails framework. Jeremy was honored to work with such talented and humble people.
In early 2006, Fusionary was using Rails for pretty much all if it's new projects, and had been successfully deploying production Rails applications for about a year. Jeremy was given the opportunity to move his family to Boston to continue to pursue his passion for learning and writing "Rails" code.
Since 2005, Jeremy has actively worked with Rails everyday, and has released a number of Rubygems and plug-ins. Some of Jeremy's projects include ServiceProxy, Seed, merb_paperclip, and ruby-fpdi. Jeremy has also been active in the Rails community, contributing to Rubinius, RubySpec, Rails, Cucumber, Machinist, memcache-client, the SQL Server adapter, Thinking Sphinx, and Mongrel cluster.
Jeremy currently lives in Arlington, Massachusetts with his wife Alicia and two sons, Isaiah and Ethan. He continues to develop everyday and enjoys the thrill of problem-solving and collaborating.
