My main homepage (with links to my personal sites) is at http://obiefernandez.com

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2029/2198083869_7f5006ff77.jpg

My real first name is Obed. It's from the Bible. Both of my parents moved to this country from Cuba in the 60s. I was raised and educated in New Jersey.

Currently, I am a best-selling technical book author and CEO/co-founder of a boutique web consultancy named Hashrocket, headquartered in beautiful Jacksonville Beach, FL. My book, The Rails Way (on Addison Wesley) is a hefty reference work for Ruby on Rails, and I'm also the series editor of Addison Wesley's Professional Ruby Series, which it is part of. In 2008, I finally left JRoller and started blogging on my own website: http://blog.obiefernandez.com -- it's the easiest way to stay up to date with my work and thoughts on life. 

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This is my old description (circa 2006):

I am proud to be a ThoughtWorker (http://www.thoughtworks.com) and count many talented software people as friends and colleagues. I still specialize in Java development and am active in the open source and agile processes communities.

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http://docs.codehaus.org/download/attachments/8608/ashcroft5.jpg

My latest open-source project is brought to you along with the great AslakHellesoy of PicoContainer-fame and hosted at http://codehaus.org/~ashcroft/

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This is my old description (circa 2002):

I am the founder of the XPAtlantaUsersGroup and engineer at MediaOcean. The following is my bio written for my XP presentation at the Georgia Web Developers Conference http://www.tagonline.org/gwdc, and gives a pretty good professional description.

Obed Fernandez is currently a systems architect for Media Ocean, a startup ASP in Midtown Atlanta. He is one of the senior members of a 10-person XP team developing a world-class ecommerce application. He has over 5 years of professional consulting experience in software engineering and holds Programmer and Architect certifications for the Java 2 platform. He has spent most of the last four years designing applications and coding in Java.  In 1997, he became the first certified instructor for SilverStream, and during 2000 he became a key resource of the SilverStream professional services group for the Southeastern USA region. He brings significant ecommerce architecture experience from engagements at large clients such as Simon & Schuster, Bass Resorts, and Harbinger Corp.