Andre Ben Hamou is the senior systems architect for Freedom 255, a major British Internet service provider. He was responsible for introducing Ruby to the organization, which is bringing about a massive increase in efficiency and interoperability both internally and with outside systems. Prior to this, he spent a decade as a general-purpose software hacker, working in Perl, C, C++, and Objective-C. He spent five years at Imperial College London working on various numerical problems including computational physics simulations, and graduated with a master of science degree with honors. He is also an associate of the Royal College of Science. During his time at Imperial College, he worked as a systems integrator within Imperial's prestigious Department of Computing. He likes walking, talking, and taking abusive liberties with the English language. He lives with his imaginary cat on the south coast of England.