About
I’m Thomas and this is my personal website where I write about Ruby, programming, software engineering and solving problems, among other things.
I have written open source software that is used daily by thousands of people. When I’m not programming in my spare time, I like to read science fiction books and seeing the world.
If you are interested in Ruby or programming/software engineering in general, this website might prove interesting!
Below you will find some information about why I’m programming and using Linux to do it.
If you are interested in the commercial side of things, head over to my business website.
Why Programming?
My parents bought the first family computer when I was 10 years old, an IBM PS/1. Since we never had a Commodore 64, an Amiga or something similar, I couldn’t do much with it at first. However, since my older brother had some experience with PCs, I watched him and learned.
Not much later I could, for example, configure MS-DOS startup myself (remember HIMEM.SYS?) and got proficient with MS-DOS and Windows 3.10. And then I discovered QBASIC - my first programming language (if you don’t count MS-DOS batch files).
From then on I was hooked on programming, learned Pascal and Delphi, and with Delphi Windows API programming - fun times! So much to learn, so much to experiment with, so much time to do all this stuff!
During my studies I was taught other programming languages like C, C++ and Java that all seemed… fine but after I discovered Ruby I knew what I would mainly use. So since about 2001 I’m programming in Ruby and never looked back - have a look at my open source projects to see what I have been up to.
Why Linux?
The first operating systems I used were MS-DOS and Windows 3.10. Windows 95 and then Windows XP were nice operating systems but after being exposed to SUSE Linux I switched to Linux, first SUSE, then RedHat, Gentoo, Mandriva, Debian, (some I have forgotten) and now I use Ubuntu for all my work.
I had a MacBook Pro once but all I ever used for were applications designed for Linux that did what I wanted them to do and also showed what they did. In contrast the Mac OS X applications always did something and when everything went well, they worked fairly well. However, there were many times they didn’t work well and you had no real chance of finding out what exactly went wrong.
As for Windows 7: I use it sometimes at work when I don’t have another choice.