Kenneth Kalmer started web programming in high school, teaching himself PHP3 while developing pet projects on Windows. During his first year of tertiary study at the Tswane University of Technology (TUT) his development skills rocketed with the introduction of formal programming theories and practices. While studying business applications, an ICT specialization offered by TUT, Kenneth experimented with several programming environments, including Java, .NET, Python, ActionScript, JavaScript and many others. During this time his love for problem solving and learning languages manifested itself.

While studying Kenneth deployed several production systems for private clients, mostly written in PHP. As the systems grew more complex and his skills improved, Kenneth soon reached the limits of what PHP had to offer, and started looking for greener pastures. While trailing Python for commercial work he discovered Ruby, and Ruby on Rails.
During 2005 his love affair with Ruby kicked off in a big fashion, with all his commercial projects getting a rewrite in Ruby.

Since then Kenneth Kalmer has earned himself the recognition as one of South Africa’s leading Ruby developers, posting several projects on Github, running an open source focused blog, presenting at local Ruby meetups, giving Ruby training to companies as well as guest lecturing on Ruby at TUT and serving on an advisory committee of the ICT faculty of the TUT.

These days he finds himself stretched between infrastructure concerns and user experience design. Tending to cloud-based infrastructure using current “devops” practices, cooking up all kinds of automation with Chef to ensure things run smoothly. And with the cloud tamed, he can focus on delivering rich client-side applications that are responsive, well tested and easy to use. Everything in between gets covered too, with a constant desire to become a better developer, and set higher standards for himself, Kenneth is striving to be a true polyglot developer.