Author Bios

Rafe Colburn
Director of Technology - Emeritas

Rafe Colburn is a Senior Software Engineer with over 10 years of experience designing and building Web applications for clients including the American Kennel Club, Bank of America, and Chevron. His areas of expertise include software development in Ruby on Rails, Java, and PHP, as well as database design and application architecture. His focus is on developing applications iteratively with input from the customer starting at the earliest phase of development, and on applying test driven development and refactoring to create applications that are easy to maintain and improve. Rafe is the author of a number of computer books on CGI programming, SQL, HTML, Perl programming, and Web publishing, including "Special Edition Using SQL," "Teach Yourself CGI Programming in 24 Hours," and "Sams Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML and CSS in One Hour a Day." He is a graduate of the University of Houston with a degree in Information Systems.

Articles by this author:

  • Why Put Your Organization on Rails? (Application Development)

    The software development industry is often driven by fads and hype. People are always talking about the new programming language, software engineering methodology, framework, or tool that will increase efficiency, lower costs, speed up development, and improve quality. The most recent fad in Web development is Ruby on Rails, a framework for building Web applications that has been the subject of many wild claims by enthusiasts. As a manager, you have to assess whether Ruby on Rails, like any other new technology, lives up to the hype.