Aaron Hillegass

Aaron Hillegass (born 1969) Is the founder and former CEO of Big Nerd Ranch. Aaron is best known to many programmers as the author of Objective-C: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, and iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide.

Between 1995 and 1997, he was employed at NeXT as a developer and trainer. In 1997, NeXT merged with Apple Computer. Hillegass elected to leave his role to start his own dot-com business. In 2000, he was then contracted by Apple to help train their software developers in the Cocoa application programming interface (API), an evolution of the NEXTSTEP API. This led to the creation of Big Nerd Ranch, a professional services company that originally worked only with Apple technologies. Today, Big Nerd Ranch provides product development, and developer training, for a range of app development projects, including iOS, Android, frontend and backend, Cocoa and user experience/user interface design.

In 2012, he merged Big Nerd Ranch with Highgroove Studios and demoted himself to Chief Learning Officer. In December 2014, he resumed his role as CEO.

He retired from Big Nerd Ranch in August 2017 and received his Master's in Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech in 2021. He sold his interest in Big Nerd Ranch to projekt202, a subsidiary of Amdocs, in June 2020.

Aaron is formerly the Director of Applied Data Science at New College of Florida in Sarasota, Florida. He is the executive director of the Kontinua Foundation, which is developing free STEM education materials for high school students.

On 8 April, 2023, in reaction to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's decision to replace the leadership of New College and remake the school in the image of Hillsdale College, Hillegass gave notice that he would quit his position and rescind a $600,000 donation to the New College Foundation. In his letter, he said, "If I were more patriotic, I'd burn the college's buildings to the ground," a remark he later described as "a poetic flourish that sounded cool until it showed up in the Sarasota Herald Tribune."

Aaron Hillegass is also an investor. In 2014, Forbes Magazine named him one of the top 10 amateur stock pickers in America after his portfolio on Marketocracy earned an average annual return of 16.2% over ten years. He was the original angel investor in Greenlight Financial Technology, Inc.