Hi, I’m Zachery Moneypenny. I really like designing and writing computer code; the more I code the more I enjoy it. I’m living in Madison, WI now and lived out in the San Francisco Bay Area for five years. I graduated in 2001 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a BS in Computer Science.

Profesionally

For the last ten-plus years I’ve worked at Intuit in various groups. Out of school I started as a QA/Automation Engineer and helped build their automation lab from scratch. That was a really cool project to work on; we started with 8 clients and one server testing a half-dozen nightly builds from various branches and the essential infrastructure has scaled to racks of servers talking to hundreds of test clients processing dozens and dozens of nightly builds.

Around 2004 I switched over to full-time software development. I work on the QuickBooks Payroll team doing desktop development. It’s primarily legacy C and C++ code but I get to dabble in the .Net arts every once in awhile. I mainly do feature development but I have worked on compliance functionality in the past. I’m currently working on refactoring a lot of the legacy code dealing with payroll service management and patch/update functionality.

Personally

Working so much in legacy C/C++ code, around 2005 I was sucked into the then-emerging Ruby/Rails world. I had some trouble at first due to the inherent difficulties in learning a language and a framework at the same time— you have a tough time distinguishing framework idioms from language. As someone new to web programming in general I really enjoyed the convention over configuration aspect, and through the world of Rails I’ve learned much, much more about web development in general.

I’ve worked on quite a few Rails sites over the years and have followed it’s progression from pre-1.0 to it’s current state. I truly believe the framework has matured in a great fashion, and I personally enjoy the fact that the maintainers are still opinionated about what Rails should be and what convention it should support out-of-the-box.

Thanks to Steve Klabnick’s wonderful talk on REST at Madison Ruby 2011 I’m now reading and learning as much as I can about RESTful design and (especially!) HATEOAS.

Socially

I try to get to as many Madison-based meetups as I can. The emerging tech community in Madison, Wisconsin is second-to-none when it comes to smart, engaged people building wonderful things. I highly recommend that you join us at one of the following get-togethers:

• Software Developer Meetup: A great time to drink German beer and talk across languages, environments, and disciplines. Sometimes involves micro-flame wars. Always involves beer and an after-party at Madison Maduro for scotch and cigars.
• Mad-Railers Meetup: All things ruby and rails. Typically held at Bendyworks or Getty Images, this meetup switches between presentation-style meetups and mroe freeform hackday events.
• MadJS Meetup: Newer to the scene but growing quickly— MadJS is all about the myriad forms of Javascript development that are happening today. Topics range from server side (Node.js) to client-side frameworks (Backbone.js, etc.) Typically held at the Asthmapolis offices.

New meetups are being started all the time (Big Data!) and there’s many more great existing ones (Clojure! Web Developers!) so if you live in or around Madison hop on Meetup.com and find something that sounds interesting.