Bruce Tate is a kayaker, mountain biker, and father of two from Austin, Texas. An international speaker and respected author, Bruce’s primary focus through the years has remained steady: rapid application of web applications. He specializes on putting highly effective teams on the most productive and most appropriate technologies.
The author and speaker
Bruce is an internationally recognized author, with nine titles published in at least 10 languages. His Bitter Java book reached number nine on Amazon’s list of all books; his Better, Faster, Lighter Java book won a prestigious Jolt award, and his books Beyond Java and From Java to Ruby books helped power the Ruby on Rails explosion from within the Java community. Bruce’s unusual and unorthodox style often mix in extreme sports stories as metaphors. His titles, spanning a more than a decade, include:
- Comprehensive Database Performance…
- Objects for OS/2
- Bitter Java (JavaOne best seller; reached #9 overall on Amazon)
- Bitter EJB(JavaOne best seller)
- Better, Faster, Lighter Java(JavaOne best seller and Jolt winner)
- Spring: A Developer’s Notebook
- Beyond Java
- Ruby on Rails: Up and Running
- From Java to Ruby: Things Every Manager should Know
- Deploying Rails Applications
Bruce’s articles include a fifteen article series called Crossing Borders (for Java developers, but about programming languages and techniques beyond Java), another called the Secrets of Lightweight Development (on tools, process, and frameworks for lightweight development), and twenty other independent articles.
Bruce is an international speaker, who regularly presents at The Server Side Symposium in the United States and Eurpoe, JavaZone in Norway, the wildly popular NoFluffJustStuff programming symposium, and many others. His keynotes include talks on managing a programming career, effective lightweight development, and using open source software instead of established industry standards to reduce complexity and improve productivity.
The Developer and Consultant
Bruce Tate serves as the CTO for WellGood, LLC, the company responsible for building ChangingThePresent.org. He designed the site and has led its development since September 2006. He also does regular training and consulting engagements.
Bruce worked at IBM for 13 years, where he served a variety of roles spanning development, customer implementation, consulting, sales, and test. This great variety prepared him to work in leadership roles, and gave him an all-encompassing vision of the software development picture. Bruce worked on database software, object oriented infrastructure, development tools, and IBM’s Java platform. He served on IBM’s prestigious certification board, to help IBM define, implement, and certify the skills required to do application development for IBM’s customers.
In 2000, Bruce started his consulting practice, and has been an independent consultant ever since. Initially, his practice focused on getting failing customers off of the elephantine EJB framework to a cleaner, more productive foundation. His customers have worked with the exploding Spring framework since its inception, and with the dominant Hibernate framework since 2003.
His company serves all sizes of companies, from very small to very large. His larger customers include Great West Life and FedEx. His smaller customers include many startups, which often depend on rapid development and a keen eye for the technologies likely to succeed in the marketplace. In 2002, Bruce worked extensively with the Middleware company, before their acquisition. Ed Roman called his relationship with Bruce “the most effective vendor relationship we’ve ever had.” Bruce also worked with Neelan Choksi at SolarMetric before their acquisition by BEA. Neelan praised Bruce’s industry vision and understanding.
Since early 2005, his sole focus has been on Ruby on Rails. To emphasize that new focus, he changed the name of his practice from J2Life to RapidRed. He has written two books since moving to Ruby full time: Ruby on Rails, Up and Running, and From Java to Ruby. These books fill niches that are important to the exploding Rails framework and the Ruby language: experienced developers new to Ruby, and managers who need to understand how Ruby can help them, and whether to make the switch.
Bruce has also worked with several customers. AutoGas, in New Braunfels, raved about the Ruby on Rails experience. Cheri Byerly, of Autogas, had this to say:
“The original application took over a year and a half with a team many times as large. We rebuilt the application and deployed within five months. … The solution allows us to easily maintain and extend the code base, which we couldn’t do without incurring outrageous costs.”