Dr Nic

About

Dr Nic is a developer’s developer.

He writes blog posts for developers; creates tools, libraries and text editor extensions for developers; and speaks to developers at conferences.

He’s the VP of Developer Evangelism at Engine Yard, the premier platform as a service.

He’s Australian and now living in the Bay Area.

And he’s funny; if you can understand his accent.

Previously

Previously he ran the premier Rails consultancy Mocra, employing some of the top Rails talent in Australia, with clients around the world. He’s written, maintained and contributed to over a 100 open source projects.

Dr Nic Williams loves to write software. For a few years, he was in denial. He tried other things. But even whilst doing those things, he ended up writing software to make them easier.

For a few years he wrote C#.NET applications but faced with the burden of buying new Visual Studio 2005 licenses began looking for a newer, more powerful language and framework.

Fortunately, in mid-2005, Ruby on Rails and Ajax were being bandied around as a powerful pair. It took 6 months before Nic realised that it was Ruby that was the power behind Rails and he has been in love with Ruby ever since.

Open Source

He flew from Amsterdam to Chicago for the inaugural Railsconf where he met “the community.” After arriving home, he started creating open source projects instead of hording his code ideas. In the first few months he started helping with the Ajax Scaffold project, created the Composite Primary Keys, Dr Nic’s Magic Models, and the New Gem Generator.

When he was a Windows user, he ported all the TextMate snippets across to RadRails to start a flourish of snippet/template activity for the RadRails IDE. People feel in love with RadRails again, and avoided buying Macs. Now, as a Mac user, he maintains or created over two dozen TextMate bundles. This is probably too many.

Conferences

Dr Nic has been presenting at International Conferences since 2007, including RubyConf, RailsConf Europe, QCON, JAOO, RubyEnRails, Rails Underground, Rails Summit Latin America, RubyConf Europe, RubyFools, OSDC, and RailsCamp. He attempts to be funny.

Becoming ‘the Doctor’

Dr Nic got his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Queensland in 2001, and found the best use for it so far was being called Dr Nic.

Dr Nic is Australian, married and father to a son and a daughter. He lives in Palo Alta, California. He catches the train to work because it’s nice having someone else drive.