Peter Cooper

peter@peterc.org (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub, Delicious)

Follow @peterc

What

Peter Cooper is a:

niche publisher and blogger
software developer (Ruby, JavaScript, C)
screencaster and podcaster
budding computer scientist
author
editor (for Internet.com in the dot com era)
entrepreneur who has sold a couple of businesses
husband and dad
co-chair of a forthcoming O’Reilly conference

I’m based in Louth, Lincolnshire in the United Kingdom. It’s cheap and I work entirely online so it suits me well!

News

I’ve just released Ruby Trick Shots, a video going over 24 Ruby tricks, in anticipation of collection together > 100 tricks into a free e-book.
I’m the co-chair of O’Reilly Fluent, a new JavaScript conference taking place in San Francisco in May.
I’ve released Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough, a 3 hour screencast guiding Ruby 1.8.7 developers through the worlds of Ruby 1.9.2 and 1.9.3. It costs money.
I’ve partnered with LaunchBit to sell advertising space in JavaScript Weekly and HTML5 Weekly (now with 20418 and 11271 subscribers respectively).
I’m working on a book - Self Promotion For Geeks - due soon. If you want to be notified and get a discount, fill in the form on that page.

Web Projects

Ruby Inside - A blog about the Ruby programming language and associated technologies. Approximately 25,000 subscribers as of mid 2011.
Ruby Weekly - A weekly Ruby programming e-mail newsletter started in August 2010 and at about 9800 subscribers so far.
Fitness Inventor - I’m responsible for the technology and design of Fitness Inventor, a currently in-development health and fitness Q&A site. The team is led by Dr. Dan Reardon.
JavaScript Weekly - A weekly JavaScript programming e-mail newsletter started in January 2011 and at about 17617 subscribers so far.
JavaScript Daily - A JavaScript Twitter feed with daily JavaScript news, a sister Twitter account for JavaScript Weekly really. 1200ish subscribers so far.
HTML5 Weekly - the latest in my line of curated e-mail newsletters, now at 9510 subscribers.
Dart Weekly - Another weekly newsletter, this time about Google’s new Dart language. Currently 900 subscribers but not going out every week due to lack of content in the Dart world.
RubyFlow - A community driven link blog for the Ruby and Rails communities (~7500 subscribers).
Hacker Slide - Time based snapshots of Hacker News you can scroll through. Ideal for catching up due to the speed of HN’s front page now. The code is on GitHub and BSD licensed.
Rails Inside - A blog about the Rails Web application development framework (~6700 subscribers).
TweetCanal - A real time, automatically updating Twitter “dashboard”/river. Perfect for watching what’s going on in the world without any delays or queuing. I personally enjoy it for watching the heckling during The Apprentice and other TV shows. Developed along with Nelson K of Safarista Design at Leeds Hack on November 6-7, 2010, where it won “Best Dashboard.”
coder.io - A site I built focusing on aggregating news and links for software developers. I never truly launched it and while it’s still running OK, it’s currently on the backburner.
Ruby Jobs Board - A popular, paid Ruby and Rails jobs board.
Criminal Record Disclosure Calculator - A pro bono project developed with an offender rehabilitation charity. It allows people to work out how long they need to disclose their convictions for (this is complex to work out under UK law).

Authorship

Currently working on Self Promotion For Geeks, my first attempt at self-publishing a book.
Author of Beginning Ruby, published by Apress (1st ed. 2007, 2nd ed. 2009.) It has sold somewhere around 14,000 copies now.
Author of the “Indexing and Searching” chapter of Ruby In Practice, published by Manning in 2009.
Co-author of Essential Ruby, published by DZone in 2009.
Referee of Controlling a Robotic Marine Environmental Sampler with the Ruby Scripting Language (Roman, Scholin, Jensen, Massion, Marin) for the Journal of the Association for Laboratory Automation.
Technical reviewer of Design Patterns in Ruby (Russ Olsen), a book published by Addison-Wesley.
Reviewer for Technical Blogging by Antonio Cangiano.
Technical reviewer for Pragmatic Guide to Sass by Hampton Catlin and Michael Lintorn.
Technical reviewer of The Revolutionary Guide to QBasic (1996) by Victor Munerman, Evgeny Yemelchenkov, and Tatyana Samoylova.

Podcasting

I have just started as a regular panelist on the JavaScript Jabber podcast, a new JavaScript podcast. Link coming soon.
Since 2010, I have been the co-host of The Ruby Show with Jason Seifer. My first episode was: #135, we’re now up to around episode 181. We get around 4000 downloads of each episode.
I’m the co-host of The JavaScript Show along with Jason Seifer. We’re now a few months in and getting anywhere between 3000-6000 downloads per episode.
I was one of the hosts of The Ruby Rogues between episodes 1-10. I left to launch my Ruby Reloaded course.
10Terms - A topical vocabulary podcast, my first foray into running a podcast. (Now defunct. A failed experiment :-))

Training

I’m currently planning future Ruby Reloaded runs.
In December 2011 I ran Ruby Reloaded 4.
In November 2011 I ran Ruby Reloaded 3.
In late August 2011 I ran Ruby Reloaded 2.
In late July 2011 I ran a course called Ruby Reloaded for 24 students. It’s for intermediate and “pro newbie” Ruby and Rails developers who want to recover the Ruby basics in a more formal way and gain some confidence about becoming a professional Rubyist.
Over 2011 and 2012, I gave 6 4-week online Ruby courses at CodeLesson to 104 paying students on dates starting: January 10, 2011; February 28, 2011; May 4, 2011; October 3, 2011; 21 November 2011 and 31 January 2012.

Code

TestRocket - A tiny testing library for Ruby. It won a publicly judged CodeBrawl contest so I thought I’d release it properly.
Bodge - A game I developed in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 22, a game development contest. It’s open source and uses LWJGL from JRuby.
Prelude of the Chambered - JRuby port - A JRuby port of a Java game written by Notch (of Minecraft fame). Still not entirely complete, but functional. 2 solid days of fun porting Java ;-)
WhatLanguage - a Ruby library to detect the language of texts
Pismo - a content analysis and metadata extraction library
rubyflow build from 2008 - An old build of the RubyFlow.com Rails 2.x source code that I shared in 2008 and that has been maintained by 3rd parties. Heroku posted about how to install it.
bitarray - Simple, pure Ruby bit array/bitfield implementation.
My GitHub profile - I have a few other minor things going on.
My GitHub gists - Lots of little ‘bits’ of code I’ve been working on.

Past Projects

Code Snippets - A tagged code snippets site I built in 2005 and sold to DZone in 2007.
Feed Digest (now Feed Informer) - Web feed manipulation and syndication service I launched in 2005 and sold to Vicman Technologies in August 2007. Users included NASA, The Denver Post, MIT, The Smithsonian Institution, and the US Department of Agriculture. Traffic was 250m requests per month. Update: I’ve written about the sale.
Mobile Orchard - iPhone developer news blog and podcast co-founded with Dan Grigsby in 2008. I designed the site and produced most of the content for the first 3 months. I handed it over entirely to Dan in 2009 as I was no longer involved with iPhone development. He has since put it on hiatus.
Apprentice Watch - A small JavaScript “app” to monitor tweets about the BBC’s “The Apprentice” show in real time.
Switchpipe was a proof of concept Web application process manager and request proxy that made it easy to deploy persistent process Web applications such as Rails apps. It was superseded by Phusion Passenger within two months but the code remains on GitHub for historical purposes.
Editor of WebPedia.com which was acquired by Internet.com in 1999. I was then joint editor of Internet.com’s WebDeveloper.com until 2000.
Editor of eboz.com in 1999 until it was acquired by iBoost.com in 2000.

Interviews and Press

Interviewed for Founders Talk #30: Peter Cooper / Cooper Press, February 2012.
I was on the panel for TechZing 160.
I was on OfficeHours.tv offering ‘office hours’ for anyone who wanted me to give them business advice. Bidding ended Monday September 5th 2011 and I spoke to six people.
My projects were discussed (though I did not appear) on episode 2 of Jawgrind, September 2011.
JavaScript Weekly was discussed (though I did not appear) on episode 145 of TechZing, August 2011.
New Ruby and Rails Training Course - Interview, May 2011.
My Motivation - Start Lots and Start Small with Peter Cooper, May 2011.
Sitepoint Podcast: Ruby is Old Enough to Drink with Peter Cooper and Jason Seifer, March 2011.
TechZing Panel - Gabriel Weinberg and Peter Cooper, January 2011.
Online Domination Through Code and Action - with Peter Cooper, December 2010.
Teach Me To Code Episode 37 - Peter Cooper, October 2010.
Three Years Ago, I Sold My Startup Because I Was An Idiot by Peter Cooper in Hacker Monthly, Issue 4 link, September 2010.
Foundora Interview: Peter Cooper on Foundora, August 2010.
TechZing #60: Peter Cooper on TechZing podcast, August 2010 [audio interview].
coderpath 5: Peter Cooper on CoderPath podcast, May 2010 [audio interview].
30 minute radio slot/interview about the iPad on BBC Radio Lincolnshire, April 12, 2010.
Peter Cooper: How to become a successful Rubyist by Dmitry Belitsky, October 2009.
Peter Cooper谈Ruby是否将会流行 by 51CTO, September 2009.
Will iPhone ‘orchard’ bear fruit? by Katharine Grayson for Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal, November 2008.
Take Five: Questions with Peter Cooper for FiveRuns (now out of business), January 2008.
Chatting with Peter Cooper by Fabio Akita, January 2008.
Interview: Peter Cooper on Rails, Enterpreneurship, and Developing on Linux by Larry Wright, December 2007.
Ruby Experts: Why They Are In Love With Ruby/Rails by Naveen Bala, December 2007.
Feed Digest, A Great Way To Republish Feeds at Laughing Squid, September 2007.
Advice for Ruby Beginners 1 by Satish Talim, September 2007.
Peter Cooper on the Ruby on Rails Podcast, May 2007 [audio interview].
How to find your angel investor by Michael V. Copeland for Business 2.0 Magazine, February 2006.
Interview with Peter Cooper, author of Beginning Ruby for Apress, 2006.
Interview with Peter Cooper by Ken Yarmosh, September 2005.

Talks

Stupid Stunts for Rampant Rubyists at Surrey Rubyists on January 24, 2012.
Introduction to Ruby at Geekup Nottingham (a 90 minute intro and live coding demo of Ruby to a technical group) on August 1, 2011.
Self Promotion for Over-Thinkers at Think Visibility, a Web business and affiliate conference that took place for the fifth time in Leeds, UK on March 5, 2011. My talk was mentioned here, here, here, and here. My speaker’s page is/was here.
Obscurity Bytes! Self Promotion for Geeks at Geekup Doncaster on September 22, 2010.
Ignoring Common Sense: The Aircraft Carrier Made of Ice and Other Technical Flights of Fancy at Geekup Nottingham, August 1, 2010.
Redis 101: A whirlwind tour of the next big thing in NoSQL storage at Hull Digital in Hull, England, June 24, 2010.
Passion, Properly Pursued, and Why Journeys are Important at Think Visibility in Leeds, England, March 6, 2009 (review).
Introduction to Ruby at Ruby Fools 2008 in Copenhagen, Denmark, April 1, 2008.
I chaired the evening panel of Euruko 2008 (the photo proof!) with Matz, Jamie van Dyke, David Black, et al. March 29, 2008.
Building a multi user dungeon in Ruby at Barcamp Manchester in Manchester, England, March 1, 2008.
I also give spontaneous talks at a local tech meetup.

Ambition

I keep track of my main ambitions on 43things. In terms of a “mission”, though, I want to make a significant contribution in and by applying the fields of mathematics, computer science and publishing/news.