Sapphire In Steel

Dermot Hogan

Dermot has spent the last twenty years working in the strange and mysterious world of investment banking, mostly on risk management technology. He has at long last decided to get a life and do something sensible which will benefit mankind - such as writing a Ruby IDE for Visual Studio.

Dermot has programmed his way through a good few of the world’s computer languages, starting with BCPL and Algol68, meandering through C, C++, C# and a few more obscure dialects, and ending up with Ruby.

His latest project has been to write a telescope controller in Visual Basic .NET, the main work being done by a real-time PIC microcontroller hooked up via a USB2 link. While doing this, Dermot realised that the missing tool in his programming armoury was something that stopped the sky rotating while he fixed a bug. The StopTheUniverse ™ debugging system is expected ‘real soon now’.

Dermot holds a PhD in Physics from Cambridge University.

 

Huw Collingbourne

Huw has programmed in languages ranging from Delphi and Java to C# and Smalltalk and has written articles and tutorials about many of them along the way. He has been a writer and columnist for some of the best known computer titles in the UK. He has written the Rants and Raves opinion column since 1988, first in Computer Shopper, then in PC Plus and now online. These days, Huw edits and publishes the online computing magazine, Bitwise. He is currently documenting Ruby In Steel and writing a tutorial book to the Ruby language itself.

Huw has an MA in English from Cambridge University.

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