Ian McFarland
VP Technology, Principal, Pivotal Labs, Inc.

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Ian is someone who has been at Pivotal Labs since about 3 years before they (or anyone else) started doing this Rails thing. He remembers when “It’s too slow! It won’t scale! You can’t build real stuff in it! It’s too Objecty! Too many files! Too hard to know what classes are being loaded! MVC and the ORM have too much magic!” were things said about Java. (He started with Java 1.0a2, and wrote the first client-server Java app ever.) Before that, he did a lot of PERL CGI and a bit of C here and there, and before that he was a Smalltalker. He was even working on worldwide distributed hypertext systems starting just slightly before Tim Berners-Lee did, though Tim’s thing worked out better for everyone, of course