Introduction - David Krett

[dbkbali]

I am relatively new to Ruby, I started programming over 30 years ago,
when punch cards were in vogue, and programmed pascal, assembly
language, fortran and cobol. After working and being exposed to IT in
a big corporation, I decided working for what amounted to a big
internal government bureaucracy was not for me and left to pursue a
20+ year career in finance and banking (the last 16 years in Asia).

During this period, I never lost my love of problem solving and my
love for modelling. I specialized on advising and valuing businesses
and throughout this period have built valuation and economic models
for many types of businesses,large and small, including modelling
electricity power plants, airlines, manufacturing business and resort
and real estate. More recently, I have been a freelance consultant
based in Indonesia and have invested in several businesses.

My love for ruby and rails developed approximately 2 years ago,
accidentally, when considering becoming an active investor in a print/
internet media business - after being put off with the print media
business but learning a lot about the challenges faced by businesses
promoting themselves in the Asian region, I developed the idea for my
current startup, What2do.Asia. After reviewing technologies and being
conned by the "Blog in 15 minutes" podcast I decided that my
application would be developed in ROR, and have fallen in love with
Ruby on Rails and the open source community.

I also have many other project ideas that I would like to pursue but
am currently staying focused. I am hoping once/or before I complete my
prototype, to find partner(s) to be actively involved in my startup
with me.

I really enjoy my experiences with the ruby community and for this
reason in the next 6 months I hope to relocate to Singapore where I
recently have incorporated a company to pursue application development
and the launch of my startup, where hopefully, I can play a more
active role in the community. Here in remote Bali Indonesia there isnt
a community and you can only do so much remotely/online.

My biggest bone of contention right now is the corruption of
universities by large corporate IT firms to bias the education of
students in developing countries towards non-open source technologies,
in the future on my own or through the community I would really like
to make a contribution to reverse this.