Alright, so there is this DIY Summit today, and I was looking over the speakers last night to see whether or not I was wasting my time. Well. . . turns out the list of speakers was solid. And as I’m looking at the line up, I see at 10:00 this guy, Kevin Lawver is talking.
Well if you don’t know who this guys is let me fill you in a bit. Kevin Lawver is a super cool, fun, and sick web designer that a lot of experience and expertise under his belt. He takes a lot of photos and is really into to his family especially his son Max. Heres the low down on Kevin. Kevin Lawver in 1999-2000 developed and programed AOL’s Maintenance Request Tool (this thing ran for eight years before they had to do any maintenance on it). Photo By Kevin Lawver
Also from 1999 to 2003 he was the sole front-end developer on AOL Search; he took this from being a delicate little nothing to being the number two search engine in the world (number one was google). Kevin also made AOL Search engine run even more efficient than before the load time went from 14 seconds to 3. 2003 to 2004 Kevin continued to work with and on AOL’s search engine to improve it and add an add a feature that allowed people and companies to put up search related adds. In 2005 he moved back to the publishing side of the game to create the fastest feed reader on the web at its launch. From 2005 to 2007 Kevin was one of three architects working on AIM Pages.”AIM Pages was a ground-breaking publishing tool for the web. It used the Dojo toolkit, a new microformat called ModuleT to describe modular web content (patent pending), several new web services, and a completely open platform for allowing users, content creators and third-party developers access to the AOL and AIM membership.”
From 2007 to 2008 Kevin designed Ficlets and is the architect for AIM Photos, and on top of that was writing a chapter in a book on adapting to web standards. 2008 to now Kevin Lawver is working for a company called Music Intelligence Solution. he is now building really sick website for them and doing it right.
His presention today is going to give us a introduction to Ruby on Rails
“Are you afraid of the “backend”? Are you intimidated by if statements, while loops and the mysterious MVC? You don’t need to be! Ruby on Rails takes the WTF out of MVC and replaces it with enthusiastic shouts of “OMFG!” By the time this presentation is over, you’ll learn what Ruby on Rails is, how to start a new project, create models, controllers and views and get from idea (we might build a blog, for example) to something that works faster than you’ve ever done it before. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a little code, some magic and the option of least surprise.”(DIY Summit)
sources used:
Dbmdi's Weblog 