Short Version (in third person):
Curt Hibbs has always been slightly obsessed with new technologies and tracking technology trends. But he will tell you that this is simply because he is lazy, always looking for new methods and technologies to make his work easier and more productive. This led to his discovery of Ruby in 2001 (when it was still relatively unknown outside of Japan) and to his founding several highly successful Ruby open source projects.
For most of his professional career, which started in the early 1970’s, Curt has been a consultant to well-known companies like Hewlett Packard, Intuit, Corel, WordStar, Charles Schwab, Vivendi Universal, and more. He has also been a principal in several startups. Curt now works as a Senior Software Engineer for The Boeing Company in St. Louis.
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Long Version (in first person):
I was born in Marshalltown, Iowa — a small town about 50 miles east of Des Moines. We lived in town, but all my relatives were farmers, so I spent a lot of my early years on or around farms. I have fond memories of building tunnels and secret rooms by stacking bales of hay.
I always liked to build things. In second grade I graduated from hay bales to electronics.
When I was 13 we moved to St. Louis, where I graduated High School and went on to the University of Missouri at Rolla. During my first year at UM Rolla, I got on the coop program working for the C.I.A., and after a another year of switching back and forth between school and work, I decided I was learning more at work than at school. So, I went to work fulltime for the C.I.A. and finished my BS in CS by taking night classes at The American University in Washington, DC.
About a year before IBM debuted its first PC (was that 1982?) I co-founded a startup company that sold turnkey computer systems to court reporters that translated their steno notes into English transcripts. Initially, as the sole technical person, I wrote the software and documentation, did field installation and tech support (fortunately, someone else did training!).
The translation system had a 97% accuracy rate out-of-the-box, and could be trained to higher accuracy. It could also translate from steno to English in real time (up to 250 words/minute)! This formed the basis of a system that we developed for CBS, ABC and the National Captioning Institute to provide real-time captioning of live news broadcasts for the hearing impaired — something that was previously impossible. This system was even used in the Supreme Court for a deaf lawyer to argue a case involving discrimination against a deaf student. This is probably the single most satisfying thing I’ve done in my career.
Next I worked as an independent consultant providing software development services to government subcontractors working in the intelligence community. But in 1985, I decided that I wanted to live in Oregon… somehow I ended up in San Francisco, instead. But, I still worked in Washington DC! That meant lots of travel as I spent one week a month in Washington DC and worked from home in California the rest of the time.
1985 was a watershed year for me. I move to California and bought a house on the ocean in rural West Marin county, dumped my PC and got a Mac, became an Apple Certified Developer, discovered Smalltalk and Object Oriented Programming, and racked up over 200,000 frequent flyer miles! But after four years I was sick of traveling (I’m really a homebody), so I quit consulting and went to work for WordStar International. At WordStar, I worked on WordStar for Windows (completely different and separate from WordStar for DOS).
In 1992, WordStar did a three-way merger with SoftKey International and Spinnaker Software and moved to Boston. I didn’t want to move to Boston, so I went back into consulting. At that time the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area was a hotbed of high-tech activity, and consulting let me get experience and exposure to a wide variety of businesses and technologies. Plus I got to add the names of lots of high profile companies to my resume, like HP, Intuit, Corel, The Learning Company, Sierra Online, Charles Schwab, etc. I was also a principle in a couple of startups (but nothing ever came out of that).
In 1999 I began to get active in open source projects. It all started with a large Mozilla based project. Then, after discovering the Ruby programming language, I co-founded several Ruby related open source projects.
Ultimately, independent consulting turned out to be too fragmented to be very satisfying. Too often, I would not be around to see my “babies” mature, plus the dot-com bust of the early 2000’s got me to reexamine the value of employment stability. I now work as a Senior Software Engineer for The Boeing Company in St. Louis.
I live with my wife and son in Lake Saint Louis, Missouri. When I’m not hiding behind my computer screen, I like to work on my house, go hiking, swimming, and biking, and I enjoy movies, chess, playing piano and guitar. (Did I mention that I don’t have any spare time?)
