Richard Kilmer (programmer)
Encyclopedia
Entrepreneur
An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...
, software programmer and conference host and speaker in the open-source software
Open-source software
Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...
community. He is an open-source contributor and developer of commercial software applications built in Ruby
Ruby (programming language)
Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...
and Flash
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast...
. His best known open-source software creation is of RubyGems
RubyGems
RubyGems is a package manager for the Ruby programming language that provides a standard format for distributing Ruby programs and libraries , a tool designed to easily manage the installation of gems, and a server for distributing them. It is analogous to EasyInstall for the Python programming...
, a package manager for the Ruby programming language most commonly used in downloads and deployments of the Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language.-History:...
web application framework
Web application framework
A web application framework is a software framework that is designed to support the development of dynamic websites, web applications and web services. The framework aims to alleviate the overhead associated with common activities performed in Web development...
.
In 2001, he co-founded both the non-profit corporation Ruby Central
Ruby Central
Ruby Central, Inc., is a non-profit organization based in the United States, dedicated to support and advocacy for the Ruby programming language....
, Inc. dedicated to the promotion of the Ruby programming language, and the for-profit corporation InfoEther, created to focus on applying the Ruby computer language in business. Currently he serves as President and CEO
Chief executive officer
A chief executive officer , managing director , Executive Director for non-profit organizations, or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer or administrator in charge of total management of an organization...
of InfoEther. Prior to 2001, he was the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer for a leading-edge P2P
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
software company where he was granted two U.S. patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
s and co-wrote a massive Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
codebase.
Between 2002 and 2005 his for-profit company performed work for DARPA on both a massively multi-agent logistics software system and the Semantic Web
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
project developing an early Ontological Web Language (OWL)
Web Ontology Language
The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...
library. Both projects drew on his expertise in computer security
Computer security
Computer security is a branch of computer technology known as information security as applied to computers and networks. The objective of computer security includes protection of information and property from theft, corruption, or natural disaster, while allowing the information and property to...
gained as a systems security manager while in the U.S. Air Force stationed at The Pentagon
The Pentagon
The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, located in Arlington County, Virginia. As a symbol of the U.S. military, "the Pentagon" is often used metonymically to refer to the Department of Defense rather than the building itself.Designed by the American architect...
.
As an active board member in the non-profit Ruby Central, he has played host to the annual international conferences put on by that organization for both Ruby and Ruby on Rails. By 2006, the Ruby on Rails conferences had become so large and popular that Ruby Central entered into an agreement with O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly Media is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books and Web sites and produces conferences on computer technology topics...
to co-promote Rails
Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language.-History:...
events in both the U.S. and Europe. Previously Rich had spoken at numerous O'Reilly Media open-source conferences. He has also been a consistent contributor at the Foo Camp
Foo Camp
Foo Camp is an annual hacker event hosted by publisher O'Reilly Media. O'Reilly describes it as "the wiki of conferences", where the program is developed by the attendees at the event, using big whiteboard schedule templates that can be rewritten or overwritten by attendees to optimize the schedule...
events put on by O'Reilly Media and is a technology blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ger.