Our story
For the record, Authorea was mostly built by physicists. My background is in Astronomy and Information Science and Nate's in Physics (Condensed Matter). Matteo, who has been involved since day one, is still a full-time Astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics where he researches stellar interiors. Before starting Authorea we were all familiar with Python (as well as R, Mathematica, IDL, and yes, Fortran). Nate decided to use Ruby on Rails to build Authorea and we couldn't be happier with that decision. Also, we all had to learn Ruby on Rails from scratch. The members of our fantastic team - Deyan, Alec, Neel, Tanya, David, and Jace - all have graduate degrees in Physics. Ok, that's a lie. Deyan is a computer scientist but he took a class in Quantum Computing once, so he's excused.