Bio

Always interested in connections, Seth has traveled from PC consulting to building web pages to internetwork engineer to Java developer to J2EE architect to Spring Framework expert and author to Ruby on Rails developer to Ruby on Rails expert and advocate to Web engineer and now Developer Advocate for Google.  Along the way was a pretty serious period of Semantic Web and Ontology research and work.

Through his journey, Seth has learned that constant customer engagement is the most important success factor for a software project.  Agile methodologies encourage and promote a tight feedback loop between the developers and the customers to ensure business value is consistently delivered as business priorities shift.

Seth is drawn to these technologies because of the connections that can be made with them.  With internetworking it’s the obvious connections between nodes on a network.  With software design the connections are between logical entities like classes and objects.  Building web applications, the connections take on more meaning as links are built between people.  Enabling and promoting connections, at all layers in the stack, is what continues to drive Seth throughout his career.

As time has progressed, Seth has grown to shift perspectives and view software development as a Craft.  Sure, there are elements of engineering and measurements, but there are also elements of art and beauty.  Being able to consider the exact and the fuzzy is what makes a great software craftsman.  Seth continues the journey towards Master Software Craftsman every day.

When he’s not building Ruby on Rails web applications, Seth is currently working on Hadoop clusters and learning how to process large amounts of data.  Believing that the world will continue to create data at an every increasing rate, Seth continues to explore tools and techniques to turn the data into information, that information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom.  This journey has taken him from large relational databases to OLAP cubes and warehousing to custom storage structures like Dwarf and finally to large parallel processing frameworks such as Hadoop.

Seth believes that languages are more important than tools, but without a tool ecosystem a language can’t meet its full potential.  His latest languages of choice are Ruby, Scala, and Java.  An true software craftsman has many tools in their toolbox, and as such Seth likes to stay current on a few different languages so there’s always a good tool for the job.

Seth has had the pleasure of working for the following organizations along his journey: Premier Visions Media (his own company, started in high school), NEC, RIT, Brivo Systems, eHawaii.gov, Camber Corp, Errorlytics, Chi.mp, Chip In, and various small consulting partners.

Seth has produced Aloha on Rails, the Hawaii International Ruby on Rails conference.  Held October 5-6, 2009 in Waikiki, this conference featured two full days of informative and timely sessions covering Ruby on Rails and the future of web application engineering. The conference facilitated the sharing of wisdom, experience, lessons learned, war stories, and panel discussions, discussions, and most importantly debate among Rails and Web developers.

Seth is currently a Developer Advocate for Google. A Developer Advocate is first and foremost a teacher, helping developers and companies be successful with Google products, technologies, and services. Google is investing heavily in the Open Web, so much of Seth’s time is spent helping developers build great systems with HTML5. Seth also thinks that Google App Engine is most certainly the best platform for web applications.

Seth moved around quite a bit growing up, but realized that if he’s going to settle down, he should pick the location with the nicest weather. He now lives in Kailua, Hawaii with his beautiful wife and son.