Ed Gibbs is a software development manager working in Sacramento, California. At least that’s his day job. He lives with his wife, two daughters, and two cats in a comfortable house with a single bathroom.
His father was an Electrical Engineer who was passionate about microcomputers and kit computers. During childhood in the 70s and 80s the family had almost every personal computer including an Interact, 4 Timex Sinclairs, several Commodores, an Adam, 4 TI/94As, an Amiga, an Apple IIGS signed by Woz, and finally a Mac SE in 1987 for his senior year of high school. In all that time Ed programmed a few basic games including Hunt the Wumpus, but decided that BASIC was just far too much work to create a simple game in.
His love affair with the internet began when he was forced to log onto the internet on his first day at Georgia Tech back in 1988. He spent time getting an undergraduate degree in physics while spending a lot of time on Usenet, FTP, talk, MUDS, telnet, gopher and even the world wide web through lynx.
From there he went off to get a masters in Political Science and met his wife, Micki Winsett. His good friend Ben Yerushalmi who just happened to work for the National Super Computing Center showed him a glimpse of the web using Mosiac on a Sun workstation. Then it was a wild ride at an early startup doing HTML, web design, and Perl CGIs. Later came Python, Java, Servlets, and JSP, and eventually the whole J2EE stack and another great ride at a professional services startup doing ATG Dynamo development.
These days he spends his time focusing on Agile methodologies, dynamic languages (Groovy, Ruby), and better productivity. Scrum is his current methodology of choice with a healthy dose of XP practices. He’s enjoying introducing and mentoring his current organization on TDD, continuous integration, code reviews, refactoring, and use cases. His passion is improving the quality of software.
Oddest Facts:
- Nevada High School Chess Champion in 1987.
- Played paintball on the national circuit for several years.
Contact: ed at edgibbs dot com