I run Reinvented, a Canadian web, database and telephony consulting company. I blog at ruk.ca, maintain a personal wiki called the Rukapedia, and podcast through Live From the Formosa Tea House.
I live with my partner Catherine and our 5-year-old son Oliver in the small Canadian province of Prince Edward Island, off the eastern coast of the country between the mainland and Newfoundland. We’ve been here for 13 years; before that we lived in Peterborough, Ontario, in the centre of the country.
I’ve worked for 25 years as a programmer, designer, broadcaster and educator; most all of my pursuits have been vaguely digital in nature. I started my career modifying BASIC source code on a TRS-80 Model One, moved on to dBASE work, took a brief tour into FORTRAN while working at a museum, wrote several applications in Pascal, caught the early edge of the web back in 1995 when I set up a early webserver (using the CERN httpd – I feel like I’m coming home to Geneva!), and I have been creating web applications in ASP, Perl, PHP and Ruby ever since. I’m a committed user of and advocate for open source software, and in recent years I’ve tried to do my part by releasing various experiments as open source projects.
My journey to LIFT began in the middle of June, 2005 at a chance dinner in Copenhagen after reboot 7.0 with Laurent Haug, Nikolaj Nyholm and his family, Doc Searls, and Ben Cerveny. At the dinner, the topic of “people organizing conferences” came up – conferences like reboot and our own Zap Your PRAM. At some point, Laurent said something to the effect of “well, I guess I’ll have to have my own conference then.” And so LIFT was conceived. And obviously I had no choice but to attend.