Wolfram Arnold, Ph.D. is a seasoned software professional close to two decades of experience and has been working on consumer web applications in Ruby-on-Rails since 2006. More recently he has been interested in mobile apps, specifically on Android and with cross-platform toolkits.
Wolfram worked as VP of Engineering at Papercheck LLC in San Francisco until January 2012. He is a frequent speaker at community meetups and conferences and regularly teaches training workshops and tutorials on Rails and Test-Driven Development.
Previous client engagements have included G5, Netpop.com, Mightyverse.com, FanSnap.com and EduFire.com.
His professional passions are:
Wolfram’s Ruby-on-Rails experience started in 2006 with his discovery of the Rails community and he immediately fell in love with the framework, its elegance and the enthusiasm of the people behind it. Also in 2006, he was an early engineer at Real Girls Media, Inc., developing the first large-scale commercial content management system in Rails for the company’s www.divinecaroline.com publishing property. In this job, he wound up pair programming at Pivotal Labs, San Francisco, learning the ropes in TDD, hands-on Agile project managment and delivering quality with every release.
Prior to 2006, Wolfram was a staff engineer in charge of new feature development for the high-end server line at EFI, Inc. Leading a small team of C++ developers he was focusing on how to develop higher quality software in a way that is more robust to change and without burning out the team. Intuitively he discovered many of the Agile practices. In 2005 the company sent him to become trained as Scrum Master.
Between 1994 and 2000, Wolfram pursued a Ph.D. degree in computational theoretical physics at the University of Oregon. In 1999 he won a student scholarship at the Advanced Computing Lab at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico where he worked on highly scalable massively parallel computational algorithms in object-oriented C++ design and expression templates.
Wolfram speaks English, German, French and Spanish and lives with his wife in San Francisco, California.