Matt Long

Matt Long grew up in Fredericksburg, VA. He went to school at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA where he studied English Linguistics and Criminal Justice. In his last year of college, he discovered he should have been pursuing a degree in Computer Science all along. Instead of starting over he began reading his roommates CS textbooks and got hooked. He got an internship writing documentation for the IT department on campus which led to a job as a technical writer. He then got a technical writing job in Colorado Springs working for MCI. In 1998 he finally got the opportunity to start using his self taught programming skills writing CGIs using perl on the World Wide Web.

In subsequent years, Matt spent his time learning and using Java, C++, C# .NET, and finally Objective-C. In 2007, the switch from PowerPC to Intel in the Macintosh gave him a chance to switch and still continue to develop for Windows. Shortly after that he began to learn Objective-C and the Cocoa development framework. Matt then started to do freelance iPhone development and has been doing the same ever since.

Matt has co-written "Core Animation: Simplified Animation Techniques for Mac and iPhone Development" and also writes for the popular OSX and iOS development blog, Cocoa is My Girlfriend". Matt can be seen on Twitter at @perlmunger and can be heard as a speaker at the Voices that Matter iOS developer conferences put on by his publisher, Pearson Education.