[Laszlo-dev] An introduction

[Mike Pence]

Hello all. My name is Mike Pence and I am currently leading the Laszlo
on Rails open source project. Oliver is helping us get off the ground
with some fantastic code contributions and we have 128 people in our
Google Group (http://groups.google.com/group/laszlo-on-rails/) and
about 30 people in our Basecamp.

I started programming when I was 11, on the TRS-80 Model II, and
learned RPG II on the IBM Sys 36 during a sunburnt summer when I was
16. I alternated between playing basketball with my Puerto Rican
friends in the projects that I lived in with reading Shelly and
Cashman's excellent book on that language.

I never got to do the college thing (friends don't let friends become
Jehovah's Witnesses) but went to the U. of Barnes and Noble and taught
myself what I needed to know to program professionally after a couple
of years of carpentry and evangelism in my early 20's.

My professional programming career started with xBase, especially
FoxPro, and quickly moved to SQL, Lingo, VB, Delphi, Java and now
Ruby. There were too few other programming languages along they way
and too many clever (but inelegant) Java API's. About the only thing I
am religious about these days is elegance in code and in prose.

I just submitted a bug into JIRA and here I am. I am hoping that
Laszlo on Rails can help to make Laszlo an even better project than it
already is, while providing the ultimate software stack for Web 3.1.

Best,
Mike Pence