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
Build a Reliable Ruby HTTP Fetcher with Net::HTTP
A scraper that worked on Friday and fails on Monday may have nothing wrong with its parser. The page might now be a login form, the proxy credentials could have expired, or the server could be asking the client to slow down. Those failures become harder to diagnose when every caller handles the network request […]
Combined Ruby and Swift Tutorial: Share Data With JSON
Build two small programs with one clear contract: Ruby exports a reading list and Swift decodes, validates and totals it.
Ruby Programming Language Overview: Read a Complete Program
Follow an order-summary program from data to output, then test empty input, incorrect types and missing keys.
Building a Social Campaign Tracker in Ruby
Campaign spreadsheets get messy very fast. One person tracks followers, another tracks video views, and somebody else has the monthly service charge tucked away in a column. All of it relates to the same campaign, although the figures need different treatment. That is a reasonable starting point for a Ruby project: a small program that […]
What Is Ruby Programming Used For? Practical Examples
Choose a practical Ruby project by its inputs, output and failure rules, from a cleanup script to a shared web application.
Is Ruby a Programming Language? A Beginner’s Explanation
Separate Ruby, Rails, IRB and RubyGems, then use a reading-goal program to see how Ruby calculates values and makes decisions.