This book was made possible by the many people who contributed with interviews and quotes. A simple acknowledgement didn’t seem like enough so I wanted to give each person a little space of their own. Thank you very much to everyone for all of your help and support.
Ricardo Anguiano
Ricardo Anguiano joined CodeSourcery in 2001 and is the Director of Information Technology. He holds degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Davis. In addition to creating software for his team he is also responsible for systems administration.
Jim Blandy
Jim Blandy is a founding member of the Subversion project and the creator of the initial design of the Subversion repository. He has also worked for CodeSourcery and Red Hat focusing on the GNU compiler and debugger. Jim currently works on Mozilla’s ActionMonkey project where he is integrating a new JavaScript engine to help FireFox run faster.
Jim was one of the first people I interviewed for this book and he has more connections to the teams in this book than anyone else. Jim helped introduce me to CodeSourcery, Mozilla, and the rest of the Subversion team. He was also the first person to introduce me to the idea of the social currency of open source.
Jim was a strong influence on the Open Teams. He lives with his wife, children, and dogs in Portland, Oregon. Find out more about Jim on his website: http://www.red-bean.com/~jimb.
Chris Brogan
Chris Brogan is a ten-year veteran of using social media and technology to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals. Chris speaks, blogs, writes articles, and makes media of all kinds at http://www.chrisbrogan.com, a blog in the top 20 of the Advertising Age Power150, and in the top 100 on Technorati. Chris’s contributions strongly influenced the Market Yourself Into a Remote Job chapter.
Ben Collins-Sussman
Ben Collins-Sussman is a founding member of the Subversion project and is currently a technical lead for Google’s Open Source Project Hosting. He is a programmer and a musician. He lives with his family in Chicago.
Find out more about Ben at his website: http://www.red-bean.com/sussman
Julia Cort
Julia Cort runs Julia Cort Recruiting, a firm that specializes in hiring remote compiler and tools developers. Find out more about Julia at http://www.juliacortrecruiting.com
Jono DiCarlo
Jono DiCarlo is the co-founder of a small Chicago company called Humanized and currently a member of the Mozilla Labs team where he is focusing on the Ubiquity and Weave projects. Jono graduated college at 17 with a degree in physics. He then earned an MS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago in 2005. He blogs about his current work and the need for better user interfaces in open source projects at http://jonoscript.wordpress.com.
Nancy Duarte
Nancy Duarte is the CEO of Duarte Design and author of Slide:ology: The Art And Science Of Creating Great Presentations She has worked with some of the greatest brands and thought leaders in the world such as Adobe, Apple, Al Gore, Cisco, Google, Hewlett Packard, Symantec and TiVO. Her firm is the largest design firm and a top woman-owned firm in the Silicon Valley.
You can learn more about Nancy’s company at http://www.duarte.com and read her blog at http://www.slideology.com.
Paul Ekman
Paul Ekman is a psychologist and pioneer of the study of emotions and their relation to facial expression. He has been named one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century by the Review of General Psychology. Dr. Ekman is the author of 10 popular and academic books. His latest book, Emotional Awareness, was cowritten with the Dalai Lama.
Dr. Ekman is the director of the Paul Ekman Group, LLC (PEG), a small company that produces training devices relevant to emotional skills, and is initiating new research relevant to national security and law enforcement. http://www.paulekman.com
Dr. Ekman has appeared on 48 Hours, Dateline, Good Morning America, 20/20, Larry King, Oprah, Johnny Carson and many other TV programs. He has also been featured on various public television programs such as News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and Bill Moyers’ The Truth About Lying.
Daniel Einspanjer
Daniel Einspanjer is a metrics software engineer for Mozilla. He works remotely from Salem, NH. He blogs at http://blog.mozilla.com/data.
Brian Fitzpatrick
Brian Fitzpatrick has been an active open source contributor for over ten years. After years of writing small open source programs and bugfixes, he became a core Subversion developer in 2000, and then the lead developer of the cvs2svn utility. He was nominated as a member of the Apache Software Foundation in 2002 and spent two years as the ASF’s VP of Public Relations. Brian has written numerous articles and given many presentations on a wide variety of subjects from version control to software development, including co-writing Version Control with Subversion and contributing chapters to Unix in a Nutshell and Linux in a Nutshell.
Find out more about Brian at his website: http://www.red-bean.com/fitz.
Karl Fogel
Karl Fogel is a founding member of the Subversion project and the author of Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project. He is an expert in the social dynamics of open source projects and distributed teams. My interview with Karl greatly influenced the general philosophy of this book. Read more about Karl at his website: http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel
Bert Freudenberg
Bert Freudenberg is a freelance software engineer works for the Viewpoints Research Institute and ports Etoys to the One Laptop Per Child platform. He completed his Ph.D. thesis Real-Time Stroke-based Halftoning in 2004. He has won awards for his work on SIGGRAPH and Plopp. Bert lives in Magdeburg, Germany with his wife and four children.
Jason Fried
37signals doesn’t have titles, but Jason Fried describes himself as “President, I guess.” He is a founder of 37signals and a managing partner. Jason is also a contributor to the popular Signal vs. Noise blog http://www.37signals.com/svn.
Scott Hanselman
Scott is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, public speaker, and author of the popular blog Computer Zen. He manages a team of people working remotely around the United States and blogs often about working remotely.
David Heinmeier Hansson
David Heinmeier Hansson is a managing partner at 37signals, the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, and a contributor to the popular Signal vs. Noise blog http://www.37signals.com/svn.
For his work on Rails, David won Best Hacker of the Year 2005 at OSCON from Google and O’Reilly. And in 2006, he accepted the Jolt award for product excellence for Rails 1.0. He has been featured on the cover of LinuxJournal and in the pages of Wired, Business 2.0, and Chicago Tribune as well as other publications.
Mark Horstman
Mark Horstman is co-founder of Manager Tools, a management consulting firm. Manager Tools has served firms such as Intel, Applied Materials, Cornell University, USAA, P&G, GE, the Federal government, and Microsoft. Manager Tools was recently the number one business podcast on Itunes in the world, has twice been named Best Business Podcast in the US, and was People’s Choice Podcast of the Year (#1 in all categories) in 2008. Its podcasts are downloaded over 80,000 times each week.
Dan Ingalls
Formerly a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Dan Ingalls is interested in dynamic languages, graphics and kernel software. He is Principal Investigator of the Lively Kernel project, a project to rethink web programming and the web itself.
Dan Ingalls is the principal architect of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the byte-coded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976. More recently, he conceived a Smalltalk written in itself and made portable and efficient by a Smalltalk-to-C translator, now known as the Squeak open-source Smalltalk.
Dan Ingalls did his first well known research at Xerox PARC where he began a lifelong association with Alan Kay. He has been a member of the Viewpoints Research Institute team off and on since the creation of the company.
Alan Kay
Alan Kay, President of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc., is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces. His contributions have been recognized with the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering “for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers”, the Alan. M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery “for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk”, and “for fundamental contributions to personal computing”, and the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation “for creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization.”
He has been a Xerox Fellow, Chief Scientist of Atari, Apple Fellow, Disney Fellow, and HP Senior Fellow. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. In 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children and learning.
Mark Mitchell
Mark Mitchell is the founder and Chief Sourcerer of CodeSourcery, Inc. He has worked on C/C++ software development tools since 1994. Mr. Mitchell has been the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) Release Manager and a member of the GCC Steering Committee since 2001. He holds degrees in computer science from Harvard and Stanford.
Mark, along with Alex Samuel and Jeffrey Oldham, is the author Advanced Linux Programming.
Catherine Moore
Catherine Moore is a Sourcerer in CodeSourcery’s GNU Toolchains Group. She has been working on open-source software, including Binutils and GCC, for 14 years. She holds a BS from Boston College.
Jason Orendorff
Jason Orendorff got his job working on the JavaScript engine of the Firefox web browser by writing some really bad code. He blogs about Mozilla hacking and the FireFox SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine at http://blog.mozilla.com/jorendorff.
C. Michael Pilato
C. Michael Pilato is a core Subversion developer, co-author of Version Control With Subversion, and the primary maintainer of ViewVC. He works remotely from his home state of North Carolina as a senior software engineer on CollabNet’s version control team, and has been an active open source developer for over seven years. Mike is a proud husband and father who loves traveling and spending quality time with his family. He also enjoys composing and performing music, and harbors not-so-secret fantasies of rock stardom. Until that all works out, though, he is content to spend his modicum of private time doing freelance web design, graphic design, audio and video production work. Mike has a degree in computer science and mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Read his blog at http://www.cmichaelpilato.com
Aza Raskin
Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 at the local San Francisco chapter of SIGCHI and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; at 19, he coauthored a physics textbook; at 21, he co-founded Humanized. Aza is currently the Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs where he works on the Ubiquity project among others.
Aza enjoys playing the french horn and puttering in his lab when time permits. Read his blog at http://www.azarask.in.
John Resig
John Resig is a JavaScript Evangelist for the Mozilla Corporation and the author of the book Pro JavaScript Techniques. He’s also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library.
Currently, John is located in Boston, MA. His blog at http://www.ejohn.org is an effective example of personal branding.
Garr Reynolds
Garr Reynolds is the author of Presentation Zen and the very popular blog http://www.presentationzen.com. He is a sought-after speaker and an expert on presentation techniques and self-branding. His personal website http://www.garrreynolds.com is an effective personal branding tool. His latest book is Presentation Zen Design.
Kim Rose
Kim Rose is the co-founder and Executive Director of Viewpoints Research Institute. In addition to overseeing all administrative and financial aspects of the non-profit organization, Kim is a media developer, media critic and cognitive scientist. She has been affiliated with Alan Kay and his research team since 1986 when she joined the “Vivarium Project” at Apple Computer.
Her publications include: “Squeak – Open Personal Computing and Multimedia” with Mark Guzdial, Prentice-Hall/Pearson, 2001, and “Powerful Ideas in the Classroom Using Squeak to Enhance Math and Science Learning” with B.J. Allen-Conn, Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc., 2003. “Powerful Ideas” has been translated into 5 languages.
Alex Rosen
Alex Rosen has been a software engineer for 14 years and has a BS, Computer Science and Engineering from MIT. He currently works at Endeca, a privately held company focused on enterprise information access software. He once got a job by warping Bill Gates.
Stefan Seefeld
Stefan Seefeld is a Sourcerer in CodeSourcery’s High Performance Computing Group. He has contributed to a variety of open-source software projects over the past 12 years, including serving as a lead developer and maintainer for Fresco and Synopsis. He received his MS in Physics from Humboldt University in Berlin and has pursued graduate studies in Biophysics at Universite de Montreal.
Nathan Sidwell
Nathan Sidwell is the Director of the GNU Toolchains Group at CodeSourcery where he has worked since 2002. He has more than 10 years of experience on open-source projects, including GCC, GDB, and Binutils, and currently serves as a GCC C++ maintainer and VxWorks target maintainer for the FSF. He received his BSc and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Bristol.
Benjamin Smedberg
Benjamin Smedberg works for the Mozilla Corporation as the coordinator and lead developer of the Mozilla XULRunner project since early 2005. He is the module owner of Mozilla’s toolkit, embedding, and build system modules. Before switching careers, Benjamin was a professional choir director and organist who worked on Mozilla as a volunteer. http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog
Atul Varma
Atul Varma is the co-founder of a small Chicago software company called Humanized. He currently resides in San Francisco and works for Mozilla Labs on the Ubiquity project as well as others.
Atul graduated from Kenyon College with a BA in mathematics in 2001, and received his MS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago in 2004. Atul’s career experiences are rather varied; in addition to a combined nine years worth of experience as a professional web developer, video game programmer, and usability consultant serving such high-profile clients as IBM Global Services and Samsung, Atul has also taught and tutored at public schools and literacy programs and worked for a variety of nonprofit organizations.
Atul blogs about Ubiquity, user experience design, and other topics on his blog http://www.toolness.com.
Chuck Wilsker
Chuck Wilsker is the President, CEO, and Co-founder of The Telework Coalition. TelCoa, is the nation’s leading nonprofit telework education and advocacy organization addressing all forms of telework and telecommuting including virtual, mobile, and distributed work. The economic, environmental, and energy benefits as well as business continuity and the needs of rural, older and disabled workers are focus areas. Chuck is frequently quoted in the National media as an expert in his field.