About Lucas

I am a professional Ruby programmer who specializes in Ruby on Rails web development. I have authored over a dozen ruby libraries and contributed to various others including Rails and RedCloth. I founded, ran and judged the popular Ruby on Rails contest called Rails Day and presented talks in many major programming conferences. I live in Portland, Oregon and am currently working full-time for MOG.

Lucas' Open-source Ruby Projects

  • Contacts - gem install contacts

    Ridiculously easy contact list exporter from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and others.

  • Starfish - gem install starfish

    Ridiculously easy distributed programming.

  • Payment - gem install payment

    Ruby creditcard processor for merchant accounts.

  • Classifier - gem install classifier

    A library that implements Bayesian and Latent Semantic Indexing classifications.

  • Shipping - gem install shipping

    A unified API for FedEx and UPS shipping prices.

  • Creditcard - gem install creditcard

    Validates creditcards using a mathematical algorithm.

  • Simple RSS - gem install simple-rss

    A simple, flexible, extensible, and liberal RSS and Atom reader for Ruby.

  • RedCloth - gem install RedCloth

    A contributor to the Textile project which makes readable text that can be converted to HTML.

  • Units - gem install units

    A general conversion library for units in Ruby.

Published Works

  • Ruby Cookbook - July 2006

    The largest printed collection of Ruby code currently published.

  • Free Encrypted Backups - October 2004

    An article I wrote for 2600 - The Hacker Quarterly about how to backup your mail.

  • Laptop Security - October 2004

    An article I wrote for 2600 - The Hacker Quarterly about how to secure your PowerBook in case it is stolen.