Derek DeVries has an education in fine arts and a strong background as a web application developer. As vice president of design for Maintainable Software, Derek leads design, branding, and user experience for the company. He is also a Zend Certified PHP Engineer with over five years experience leading PHP development teams at Xerox, Amici LLC, and several startup companies. Derek has worked on a number of Ruby on Rails products in his current position and in his spare time develops SportSpyder.com, a Rails application for finding the best new sports articles on the web.