Mark Bates is the founder and chief architect of the Boston-based consulting company Meta42 Labs. Mark spends his days focusing on new application development and consulting for his clients. At night he writes books, raises kids, and occasionally he forms a band and "tries to make it."
Mark has been writing web applications, in one form or another, since 1996. His career started as a UI developer writing HTML and JavaScript applications before moving toward the middle(ware) with Java and Ruby. Nowadays, Mark spends his days cheating on Ruby with his new mistress, CoffeeScript.
Always wanting to share his wisdom, or more correctly just wanting to hear the sound of his own voice, Mark has spoken at several high-profile conferences, including RubyConf, RailsConf, and jQueryConf. Mark has also taught classes on Ruby and Ruby on Rails. In 2009 Mark's first (surprisingly not his last!) book, Distributed Programming with Ruby, was published by Addison-Wesley.
Mark lives just outside of Boston with his wife, Rachel, and their two sons, Dylan and Leo. Mark can be found on the web at: http://www.markbates.com, http://twitter.com/markbates, and http://github.com/markbates.