Rick Hightower's Bio

 

Rick Hightower serves as chief technology officer for ArcMind Inc., a training and consulting firm specializing in Spring framework, JPA/Hibernate, and JSF and also founded Mammatus Inc where he is the CEO. During the day lately, he is the chief architect at a medical device company that focuses on mobile medical devices.

 

He is author of the best-selling book Java Tools for Extreme Programming (#1 SW development book on Amazon for 3 months) and coauthor of Professional Struts and Struts Live (#1 download on TheServerSide.com 2004-2007). Rick also wrote a book on Python that covered programming and OO basics (This book has been used as college text for introduction to programming and software development).

 

He is the founding developer of the Crank project, a Spring, JPA, JSF, Facelets, Ajax based CRUD framework for idiomatically developing GUIs. (Crank is similar in concept to Rails and Grails.)

 

He was recently a Zone Leader for JavaLobby and is on the editorial board for the Java Developer's Journal (and writes for the JDJ on occasion). In addition, he writes for IBM developerWorks (Spring, JPA, Hibernate, JSF, Facelets, etc.)

"Rick has the distinction of writing the single most popular article/series ever published on the Java technology zone." --Jenni Aloi

Rick also wrote a book on Java Web Development which is the number one download on TheServerSide.com.

 

Rick has spoken at JavaOne, XP Universe, SD West, SD East, etc., over 20 different conferences as well as being a speaker at many user group meetings (like JUGS in San Jose, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, etc.) on topics ranging from Spring AOP to Facelets.

 

Rick has 26 software development certifications and has been director of development at three different software development firms as well as CTO of two different consulting/training companies before founding ArcMind Inc. in 2003.

Rick has managed small and large development groups. He is enjoys managing software development groups and has a lot of success turning dysfunctional teams into software development forces of nature. He enjoys building up teams almost as much as writing software.

 

Rick wrote and maintained the ArcMind Spring course, JSF course, Hibernate course, Ajax Course and JPA course.  Rick is on the JSF 2.0 spec committee. More recently, Rick has been bitten by the Django bug, and has been focusing on how to use Django to build a technical course-ware power house.

Rick enjoys running, biking and lifting heavy inanimate objects. Rick has recently ran two half marathons and bench pressed well over 400 lbs (in 2008). He enjoys goal oriented, non-boring exercise. He will seldom do the same thing more than once.

 

Blog and articles by Rick Hightower on Spring, JPA, Hibernate, etc. 

Feel free to contact Rick at richardhightower AT gmail DOT com.