Aaron founded the Ranch in 2001, just one highlight in a glowing career that began in childhood. He began programming at the ripe old age of 10 in the basement of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. At 19, he started programming professionally, in the Advanced Signal Processing Lab at the Mitre Corporation. There, he wrote the data structures library for Tower Eiffel, before leaving to work on Wall Street to help create mortgage-backed securities (a device that would, fifteen years later, bring our entire economy to its knees).

But Aaron is no stranger to having such a huge impact. He wrote the book widely regarded to be the bible of Mac development: Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. This guide is now in its fourth edition and has been translated into French, German, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.

Aaron’s list of impressive accomplishments goes on and on: he’s a triathlete, a developer of popular software and an accomplished public speaker. He has created apps for Fortune 500 companies, he could eat a gallon of flan and he can touch his tongue to his nose.

Aaron Hillegass