Verified Ruby-Doc.org author
Ruby developer, writer, and creator of Ruby-Doc.org
James Britt created Ruby-Doc.org in 2002 as a central home for Ruby documentation and learning resources. After serving as its long-term maintainer, he now writes practical Ruby tutorials and code examples for Ruby-Doc Learn.
About James Britt
James is an artist, writer, musician, technologist and Ruby developer based in Scottsdale, Arizona. He operates Neurogami, which he founded in 2001 for software, art and interactive technology projects.
His Ruby work spans documentation, teaching, JRuby desktop development and open-source projects. For Ruby-Doc Learn, his focus is useful, runnable examples that explain not only what a piece of Ruby does, but when a developer would use it.
- Ruby programming
- Ruby documentation
- JRuby development
- Developer education
Ruby community work
James's public Ruby record extends beyond maintaining Ruby-Doc.org. Independent sources document his technical writing, conference talks, JRuby open-source work and published Ruby packages.
Technical writing
Ruby-lang.org highlighted his 2004 Linux Journal article on manipulating OpenOffice.org documents with Ruby.
Conference speaking
RubyEvents records his MountainWest RubyConf talks “Black-boxing with Ruby” (2007) and “Hubris: The Ruby/Haskell Bridge” (2010).
JRuby and open source
InfoQ interviewed James about Monkeybars, a JRuby MVC framework, and the Rawr packaging tool.
Published Ruby packages
RubyGems lists James as an author of qft and Neurogami-wiiremotejruby.
These sources support James's documented work in Ruby publishing, conference speaking and open-source development. They do not identify him as a Ruby core committer.
Why this profile is verified
Ruby-Doc.org has verified James's identity and current author role. The site's history and his professional background are independently supported by:
- James Britt's original Ruby-Talk announcement of Ruby-Doc.org on 10 November 2002.
- O'Reilly's James Britt author biography, which records his Ruby community, writing and Ruby-Doc.org work.
- James Britt's official personal profile and Neurogami profile.
Identity and role verified by Ruby-Doc.org. Last verified 2 September 2026.
Articles by James Britt
AI and Ruby: An Unexpectedly Natural Pairing
Let’s say you’ve got an inbox for support inside your Rails app. A customer has sent 6 messages. Two people have responded. Now someone else opens up that ticket and wants to know what happened. A little bit of context would really help. If you want to get that functionality into your app (without switching […]
Proxy Rotation in Ruby: The Patterns That Actually Work
A Ruby web crawler may start out with three proxy servers and a call to Array#sample. That can work at first. Later, a proxy begins to fail, retries repeat more work than expected, and the database fills with pages that contain no useful records. Your Ruby code still has to determine which server to use […]
Public Status Pages for Ruby on Rails Applications: Looking Beyond a Green Dashboard
Picture a familiar Rails support problem: a customer has requested a CSV export, the application has accepted it, and the download never arrives. You open the dashboard. Everything looks fine. Somewhere behind that working interface, an export job is waiting for a worker that isn’t coming. Explaining this with a green “All systems operational” badge […]
Building a Ruby on Rails Referral Tracker: Healthcare Software Partners vs Contractors
A referral has been sent, but nobody knows whether the specialist got it. Reception checks the electronic health record (EHR). A nurse searches her inbox. Another employee looks at the spreadsheet. Consider a Ruby on Rails project built around that day-to-day problem: a referral tracker for an outpatient clinic. The proposed application would track referrals, […]
How to Compress Ruby Demo Videos
In many cases, all we want to view in a Ruby demo is one simple thing, like finding out which button caused a Rails form to fail. Instead, our demo is two minutes long. And the file size is equal to a director’s cut. Gem documentation, pull requests and bug reports should never include unnecessary […]
Build a Flight Enquiry Tracker in Ruby on Rails
A customer asks about a charter flight for Friday. Later, they change the departure airport, add another passenger and ask whether the original quote still applies. The team now has several emails describing different versions of the same trip. That is a useful Ruby project: an application that keeps the request, its revisions and the […]