Peter Cooper
I want to hip all of you cool cats to one of my heroes: Peter Cooper. I’ve never met Peter in person, but I have met him online through his mighty Ruby blogs Rubyinside.com and Railsinside.com, his best of class book Beginning Ruby (which I use for my CCSF and CSM Ruby courses), and through his entertaining Tweets as @peterc.
One of the things I admire about Peter is that he fearlessly shares inside information about the business side of being a successful blogger and author. He reveals about how much money he makes for ads on RubyInside.com, and he writes about his his pain and gain as an Apress author. When you read this amazing post, be sure to check out the A-listers who added in their comments on the publishing business, including Geoffrey Grosenbach of Peepcode.com and Tim O’Reilly himself. This is priceless stuff.
Where many Rails developers have uncritically anointed DHH and 37Signals as prescient Royalty/Illuminati/Life Style Gurus, Peter Cooper matter-of-factly reveals that he’s lost his enthusiasm for Rails. He’s even donating his Railsinside.com blog (6,000+ subscribers) to the Rails community because he can’t muster the enthusiasm to keep it going. I find it refreshing to hear a clear voice say that the Emperor is no longer absolutely fascinating.
Since the introduction of the iPad a few weeks ago, Peter has learned Objective-C, gotten a strangle hold on the iPhone SDK, and hacked out an amusing arcade game in a matter of weeks. If you’ve been following his tweets as @peterc, you’ve been able to watch his game progress from concept to working code. This fun stuff.
Kudos, @peterc.
