Hello dear Rubyists,

I have been quietly reading the list for the last two months now and
before I participate I would like to introduce myself and talk a little
bit about what I plan to do in Ruby. Before that I would like to say how
impressed I am with the nice tone of this list. This list must be the
most civilized list I have read (and I read quite a few) and all the ppl
are very nice. Almost every day there is something great to learn. Let's
hope it stays that way. I really would have liked to participate early,
but as always there is so much work that I simply didn't have any time
for that in the past.

My name is Sascha Ebach, I am almost 30 and I am living and working 
mostly from home in a smaller town (Troisdorf) near Cologne in Germany.
Together with two other partners I run a small web design / development
firm called Hexatex (hexatex.de). We do almost anything that has to do
with web design / development, be it a small company site or an online
shop. We specialize in standards based web design with as much common
sense accessibility as possible. At the moment we even have some soon to
be released pro bono work for two non-profit organizations which will
really stress this.

Like many fellow Rubyists my personal background in programming is in
PHP (for the last 3.5 years now). That is what I have to use everyday at
work. But when I want to have fun while programming I use Ruby. Now that
I have become more confident in my Ruby hacking I plan
to gradually upgrade all of my sources to Ruby. I occasionally program
small admin scripts and have programmed some simple one time Open Office
Calc convertors (don't ask for the source, it's a mess ;) but my main
focus is in web development. I have a lot of questions in that area and
I will address them one by one in the near future.

I am a great fan of small and simple solutions. Whenever a script (file)
gets more than 100 lines long I get pretty nervous. Usually I try to
refactor it until it is under 100 lines (I know that this is not always
possible :). So far I haven't encountered any language which supports this
as good as Ruby. For this I thank the creator.

I look forward to finally being able to participate on this list. I 
didn't dare before a formal introduction ;)

-- 
Sascha Ebach                       Hexatex Holistic-Webdesign
Hugo-Junkers-Str. 26               50739 Köìn
Web: http://www.hexatex.de         mailto:se / hexatex.de
Tel: 0221 / 5994393                Fax: 0221 / 5994394