About me

My name is Zach Ruffin, and I was homeschooled from 3rd grade through high school. I went to college at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where I majored in Computer Science and minored in Applied Mathematics. I built my first website almost 30 years ago when I was 16 years old, and I have been working as a software engineer for 20+ years. My specialty is building applications for small businesses and nonprofits.

That wasn't always the plan. Originally, I wanted to work in game development, but during Hurricane Katrina I found myself captivated by the work of folks who came together on the ground to build tools that helped reunite families and coordinate relief efforts. After that, I decided I wanted to be the kind of developer who could get dropped into a crisis and build something that would help people, and that has been my focus ever since.

I've worked at a number of organizations over the years, but I'm most proud of the decade I spent at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, where I built tools to help law enforcement and families find missing children and combat child exploitation. I have since left that work and currently work in artificial intelligence. But, I think once you've been bitten by the bug of building software for a mission-driven organization, it's hard to go back to building things that don't have an obvious positive impact on the world, and I always find myself looking for opporunities to give something back with the skills that I have.

So, Ruff Registrar was born out of a desire to build something that could be really helpful for a community that I care about, and that I think is really underserved by the software options that are available. I also wanted to build something that could be a sustainable business, so that I could continue to support and improve the product over time. I'm really excited about the potential of this project, and that's why I've decided to make it available as a hosted product in addition to the open source community edition, because I want to make it as easy as possible for co-ops and other small organizations to get up and running with this tool, and I think that offering a hosted option is a great way to do that.