About Us
Who are the Ajaxians? We think of the entire community as Ajaxians, but the folks behind the ajaxian.com site are:
Dion Almaer
Dion Almaer is the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, the leading source of the Ajax community. Dion is part of the Google Developer Programs group, which enables him to work with developer facing technology. Dion has been writing rich web applications from the beginning, and is a columnist on Enterprise Java topics at openxource.com, onjava.com, TheServerSide.com, and of course his blog at almaer.com/blog. He enjoys writing, and speaking at events such as JavaOne, JavaPolis, TheServerSide Symposium, and the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium tour. He also participates on the Java Community Process expert groups, and the open source community as a whole.
Ben Galbraith
Ben Galbraith is a frequent technical speaker, occasional consultant, and author of several Java-related books. He is a co-founder of Ajaxian.com, an experienced Chief Technical Officer and Enterprise Java Architect, and is presently a consultant specializing in enterprise architecture and Swing/Ajax development. Ben wrote his first computer program when he was six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce just after turning twelve. For the past few years, he’s been professionally coding in Java. In 2005, Ben delivered over a hundred technical presentations at venues including JavaOne, JavaPolis, and the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposiums.
Michael Mahemoff
Michael Mahemoff is a hands-on software consultant with nine years commercial experience. Building on psychology and software engineering degrees, he completed a PhD on design patterns for usability. He’s the founder of AjaxPatterns.org, an Ajax design reference soon to be published as the “Ajax Design Patterns” book, and the creator of the corresponding Ajax Demos. Michael has run conference sessions on agile topics such as Extreme Usability and Self-Documenting Software. Java/J2EE has been the dominant programming platform in his career, though personal projects have used Ruby, PHP, and plain-old Bash. His blog and podcast covers a mix of Ajax, agile, programming, and the occasional usability rant.
Rey Bango
Rey is an industry veteran, with over 19 years of experience in information technology. He brings a unique perspective to RIA development having built true desktop applications for 8 years prior to moving into web programming and being keenly aware of the challenges involved in building desktop-like web applications. Rey is also member of the jQuery JavaScript library’s Core Project Team.
He’s developed a wealth of knowledge stemming from his work with such technologies as client/server, OOP, PowerBuilder, Sybase, ASP, ColdFusion, DHTML, & Ajax. His blog can be found at reybango.com.
Chris Cornutt
Chris Cornutt is mainly a PHP developer, and has been working with the language for over 6 years now. He also runs the PHP news/community site, PHPDeveloper.org. He has recieved his ZCE (Zend Certified Engineer) and is very involved in the PHP community.
Chris has been published in serveral sources, including a selection from the Worx book “PHP String Handling” and several issues of PHP Magazine on a wide range of topics. He is also a part of the newly formed php|architect’s Pro::PHP podcast, developing and recording the podcasts’ bi-weekly newscasts.
Salil Deshpande
Salil Deshpande is a Silicon Valley veteran and insider. He advises Ajaxian and finds scoop on Ajax and Web 2.0 happenings in the valley and beyond. Salil is muddling through ideas as Partner at Bay Partners, a venture capital firm, where he also helps find and evaluate investments in Ajax, open source, and online communities. Prior to that he was CEO of several companies, including The Middleware Company, which operated sites such as TheServerSide.com and TheServerSide.NET.
Dietrich Kappe
Dietrich Kappe is a co-founder and the CTO of Pathfinder Associates, LLC, a hybrid User Experience Design and RIA development shop. Dietrich published one of the first 100 public web sites and launched one of the first Java Servlet-based web applications. He has been a software engineer for over 17 years, a frequent open source contributor, and has developed applications for the Media, Financial Services, Insurance and Healthcare industries.
Dietrich is a technical speaker on Agile Software Development, AJAX and Business Rules technology. He publishes the Agile Ajax and Business Rules blogs and is a contributor to the RealRules Blogzine.
Rob Sanheim
Rob Sanheim is a software developer with over six years development experience and over ten years of IT experience. He is a Sun Certified Java Programmer with extensive experience in developing web applications. Rob has experience in a variety of Java open source frameworks, including Spring, Hibernate, and Struts.
His passions include test-driven development, agile methodologies, and playing around with Ruby to keep his skills up until he can get paid for it. Rob has also done a considerable amount of work with Ajax applications and is a co-editor for Ajaxian.com. He is currently employed with the Madison based consulting firm Smart Solutions. His blog on all things relating to software can be found at robsanheim.com.
Chris Heilmann
Chris Heilmann has been a web developer for over years, after being a newscaster, audio producer and radio journalist for two. He works for
Yahoo in the UK as trainer and web architect and oversees the code quality on the front end for Europe and Asia. Previously he worked for several agencies and dotcoms and created multinational and -lingual sites for clients like HP, McDonalds and VisitBritain.
He is very much dedicated to creating a usable, accessible and future-proof web and is agnostic to the technologies involved to build them - as long as they produce code that adheres to an understandable standard. He is a strong believer in a move from web development as a technical problem to seeing it as a matter of teamwork and different layers of technology and skillset working seamlessly together.
He’s published several books on the topics of accessibility, JavaScript and creating web products using APIs and hosted services.
He blogs at http://wait-till-i.com and is available on many a social
network as “codepo8.”.
