www.artima.com
Ron Jeffries
Sometimes you just have to stop holding on with both hands, both feet, and your tail, to get someplace better. Of course you might plummet to the earth and die, but probably not: you were made for this.
Life tough is. Then die you do. --Yoda
OWWW! Lying on my ear you are! --Yoda in bed
Proprietor of Xprogramming Dot Com, Ron is an independent consultant, infamous for over three years of assistance on the C3 Payroll project at Chrysler (Chrysler Payroll). He was invited into the project by Kent Beck, who has to date not admitted his mistake in doing that. He struggled to write a Sudoku solver using his own techniques, but that doesn’t matter — he can help you be a better programmer today!
I'm curious who says it was a mistake and why? Seems a pretty arrogant thing to say. [Just guessing here ... but I suspect that Ron said that, in an ironic, self-deprecating, funny kind of way.]
Ron is available for XP-related speaking, training, and coaching, world-wide. mailto:ronjeffries@acm.org.
There used to be a link to www.armaties.com here, but the site seems to have been taken over by others (it's now seriously NSFW), and has no longer any relationship to Extreme Programming. Ron's current website is xprogramming.com 
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Ron was Chief Scientist at Oak Tree Software in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has been Principal Scientist at Allen-Bradley Company, and Vice-President of R&D at Comshare. People have paid over half a billion dollars to use software Ron and his teams have written. Several of them have been quite satisfied. He hasn't got a dime of the money.
"Why do so many people like Martin Fowler and Ron Jeffries in software development community title themselves SCIENTIST? What is SCIENTIST?"
Ron and his teams have written, among other systems, two commercial operating systems, three commercial relational database management systems, compilers for FORTRAN and Pascal, and a partridge in a pear tree. He has degrees in math and computer science, but of course those are from back when the integers were of finite cardinality and computers worked in decimal.
Ron has been an avid reader of the how-to-do-it literature since the IBM 704. He keeps hoping he will find the book that tells him how to do it. His fundamental orientation, if he has one, is that good programs are simple, even if they do complex things.
(See Ron's Oak Tree Diagram for an example of artful simplification -- Ward Cunningham) Objects help with that, of course, and patterns offer the same prospect. After all, if someone else has already done it, and will tell how, it becomes simple for the next guy.
Ron Jeffries is not to be confused with Ross Jeffries, who is someone else, and "Ron Jefferies", which has one too many es. Nor with Raymond Burr of "Chief Ironside" fame, ;-) Nor with Ron Jeremy, for that matter. ;)
Ron is also not the delightful Ron K Jeffries, whose information page can be found at ronkjeffries.pen.io , and whose blog is at blog.eronj.com
Check out Ron K's thoughts: he's a good guy.
blogs.msdn.com
Together with Grigori Melnik, Ron co-edits the IEEE Software Special Issue on Test-Driven Development due in July/Aug 2007. See the Call for Papers at Ieee Software Special Issue On Test Driven Development
See original on c2.com