Posts tagged with: "insider"

It's a typical love story. Boy becomes a developer. Boy meets Java. Boy spends years with Java in what he believes to be a righteous and dignified relationship. He hears whispers of a better language from far away lands, and her name is Ruby. Of course, the loyal and virtuous developer dismisses the rumors as unscrupulous stories, and he clings tightly to his superior languages and the comfort they bring him. But like all truly good languages, Ruby finds her way to the developer's heart, and she makes herself at home.

This week in the Intridea Insider, meet Ping Yu, Director of Asian Operations at Intridea, former Java and C++ developer, and veteran Ruby and Ruby on Rails evangelist.

Ping received a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, and another Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from The Catholic University of America. He spent his undergraduate time studying Computer Science from a prestigious university in China, where he grew up. "A lot of my friends were applying to graduate schools in the United States. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I decided to go along with it and apply too." After finishing his degree programs in the states, he joined a Maryland fiber optical company during its startup phase, doing Java, C++ and a lot of J2EE. After surviving a tough round of layoffs, he moved to a network security company, hacking linux kernel.

When Ping started college in China, he dreamed of being an architect, but a degree in Architecture was not in the cards: "You know, in China things are different. You have to get into the hottest field, and the hottest field isn't necessarily the one you like." Although Ping was exceptionally talented in programming and did well in his CS program, he always felt like he had to force himself to program.

His experience at graduate school in the states was more positive and helped to shape his love for programming; when he met Dave Naffis and Pradeep Elankumaran of Intridea years later, he was enticed to learn Ruby. "Dave and Pradeep loved Ruby. But when I picked up Ruby for the first time I did not like it, since I was so used to Java and C++. Ruby was too tricky for me, especially Rails." His first encounter with Ruby wasn't love at first sight, but the fling continued. "But once I understood the language and the problems it was trying to solve, I was in love. Now I can never go back to Java or C++. The languages put too much useless burden on the programmer. They are not as fun to work with as Ruby."

Ping came on board with Intridea during our infancy. He was employee #4, and has been part of the vision and culture of our company from the beginning. He has helped to grow Intridea from a group of four guys working at their dining room tables, to a company of 40+ Ruby and Rails developers and designers that span continents and multiple time zones. His work as Director of Asian Operations aims to bridge our Asian team of Rubyists with our centralized team in the states. "I believe in helping to extend Intridea into China. There is so much talent in China, it feels like a natural thing to do. Intridea has a culture of quality, and I want to bring that to these developers. They love Ruby, and they have so much energy."

Although Ping spent several years living in the MD/DC area, he now lives with his lovely wife, Maggie, in Minneapolis. He met Maggie in grad school, and she later went on to Georgetown Law School before becoming an attorney and accepting a job in Minnesota. They share their home with their beloved golden doodle, Jojo (a golden retriever and poodle mix). He prefers the warmth of the DC area to the numbing temperatures and tempestuous winters of Minneapolis, and mentions that he hopes to move back in the next few years.

Ping doesn't feel any loss over his break-up with Java or C++. A lot of his friends are still using Java and C++ though, so I asked if he gets into language wars with them, and he answered with distinct clarity: "There is no need to argue. They know Ruby is better." Joining Intridea and learning Ruby sparked his passion for programming, and he is confident in the decisions he has made. "The the thing that matters is whether you choose life or life chooses you. I am glad I chose Intridea."

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

He is a moderately reformed NBA fanatic and at one point knew the names of players on every NBA team. He is a serious coder, and spent six years working on battlefield simulations. You don't want to challenge him to any duels involving Physics. Or code quality. This week, meet our Senior Software Engineer, Raymond Law.

Ray taught himself Ruby and Ruby on Rails, but not before spending years programming in Pascal, C, and C++ and teaching himself PHP. His first language was Pascal, which he learned in high school while living in Hong Kong in the early 1990's. "I started programming in Pascal back in school in Hong Kong in 1992 because it was the language used in the public exams. And since I had a functional programming background, it was easy for me to switch from Pascal to C first, and then to C++."

Ray's family left Hong Kong to come to the United States when he was still in high school. He remembers struggling with leaving his life and his friends behind in Hong Kong; "I was just very sad to leave so much behind. I was on the right path to get in to a university in Hong Kong, so I didn't understand why my parents wanted to move." He later appreciated that his parents wanted to move for the potential of a better life for their family; and since he had a really good English instructor in Hong Kong, he already had a good foundation to start his new life in the states.

Armed with a love for both physics and computers, he entered college at Virginia Tech with the intention of majoring in Physics. "I liked Physics because I had a very good instructor in Hong Kong. I would tell people that the harder the exams were, the happier I was; I like the challenges of tests and applying my knowledge." He started out his first semester by taking an advanced level Physics class; "I got a bad grade on the first exam, but then I worked incredibly hard to get the highest grade on the final exam." He talks proudly about achieving that goal; "My professor personally told me: 'This is the stack of exam papers sorted by scores, and yours is on top.' I will never forget that moment."

Despite his enjoyment in studying Physics, Ray later changed his major to Computer Engineering and minored in Computer Science and Mathematics and finished college in only 3 1/2 years. He explains the difference between Computer Engineering and Computer Science: "Engineering is about finding solutions to problems. CS is more focused on theoretical ideas and algorithms." He has found his background in Engineering to be incredibly useful in real world situations. "Currently, I'm working on migrating a large amount of assets from a server-based file system to Amazon S3. It's a very involved integration but I love it because I'm solving a real problem. My engineering skills are very useful in this situation." He believes in taking small steps when he's programming, and he is extremely methodical; "Change one variable at a time and look at the results. Then you can have meaningful comparisons. As programmers, a lot of times we are inclined to implement the whole solution and hope that it works. But it rarely works that way."

For similar reasons, Ray believes strongly in testing and behavior-driven-development. However, he approaches testing with flexibility, based on the needs and requests of the end clients. "Realistically, some clients don't understand the value of testing and it can be hard to convince them of the advantages. I try to explain to clients that if we are allowed the time to write good tests, it will result in better quality code and it will help them down the road."

Ray really understands the dynamic of the client relationship. He talked with me about the importance of understanding where a client is coming from and noted that oftentimes the client knows what they want, but they don't have the technical knowledge to understand the process that must be taken to bring about their desired results. "It's important to explain our technology decisions and talk them through how the code works if that is what they need. Clients hire us because they don't know how to do this themselves. It's the same reason that I hire someone to do my landscaping; it's not that I'm ignorant and couldn't learn to do it myself, but I am using the time I save to do other things that I am good at. So when I respond to clients, I try to be specific and encouraging so that they understand that we are here to help them, not laugh at them. I think that is an important understanding for us to have."

Perhaps it's Ray's gentle and understanding nature, combined with his explicitly genius talent for problem solving that makes him such a great developer. Whatever it is, we are fortunate to have him on our team. Ray enjoys working with us too: "I am just enjoying my life - I have a great family of my own, and a great job at Intridea where people value each other." Ray lives in Virgnia with his wife Vinly, whom he met his freshman year at Virginia Tech. Vinly majored in Architecture and found a great firm to work with after graduating. They have a baby girl, Chloe, whom they adore completely. Ray says, "Chloe is the best thing. Nothing compares to Chloe smiling at me."

Ray works from his home office, and enjoys the flexibility that being part of a distributed team affords him. "I work very effectively at night. When you work in the office, there are many distractions. So I enjoy working from home so that I can arrange my schedule in order to do my best work at nighttime. I often work until 4 or 5 am." Before joining the Intridea team, Ray worked as a DOD contractor on battlefield simulation software for TARDEC, the U.S. Army's Tank and Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center. He spent six years with the DCS Corporation before he met Dave, Senior Partner at Intridea. By this time, Ray had already taught himself PHP, Ruby and Rails and was using Rails for several personal projects, including a list application and a small app for locating local badminton playing locations. On learning Rails, he reflects, "Learning Rails was so intuitive to me because everything seemed to make perfect sense. Stuff like convention over configuration and MVC just made sense to me. I think Rails understands the pains of developers and tries to ease or eliminate the pains so we can focus on application logic."

Thinking back to his old life in Hong Kong, I ask Ray if he has any lingering regrets now about leaving his life behind and moving to the states: "Nobody knows what would have happened if I hadn't moved. So I am not looking backwards." In the end, it all worked out - a brilliant and lovely wife, adorable baby daughter, his parents and brother living nearby in Virginia, working for a company he believes in and programming in a language that he loves.

美好人生 "It's a wonderful life."

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

He can turn empty pixels into tasty bits of candy; with only a touch of his fingertips he transforms the mundane into the extraordinary. This week in the Intridea Insider, meet our prodigious web designer, David Potsiadlo.

"Pots", as we call him, is loved by all of us at Intridea for his artful and brilliant designs. His most famous work at Intridea was the redesign of Intridea.com that went live early this year. Aside from his stunningly simple and creative designs, what is most fascinating is his design process and sources of inspiration, which we talked about at length during our interview.

Pots draws inspiration from several sources, with an overall approach to design shaped by the writings of the author and comparative mythology scholar Joseph Campbell. "The goal with the Intridea redesign was to incorporate the spirit of the old site (the grass, trees, and sky), while simultaneously incorporating design elements from Michael's most recent design (the fuchsia, beige, etc)."

Pots then explains how this quote from Campbell, "we live today in a terminal moraine of myths and mythic symbols", inspired him during the preparatory stage of the design process. "What Campbell is saying is that we, in the modern world, are surrounded by the remnants of symbols and images by which people in the past used in their attempts to express the inexpressible. New mythic structures seemingly always grow out of old ones, and include symbols and that the previous ones had. This is often equally true with the forms of a visual design." Pots believes that a website can be the "visual spirit of a company." He reasons, "So, I thought it right – and perhaps more importantly, helpful – to honor the existing design (Michael’s) along with our original Intridea design." On our new site you'll see clouds, grass, hills and trees, along with some of the fuchsia and beige elements that Michael introduced in his previous design.

After collecting ideas on the inspiration board, he focuses in on a specific direction and design concept. "The next step is tricky, and I think where the magic hopefully happens. The idea is to look at the old and existing, and let it pull you in a way that 'takes you past it.' The idea is not to get stuck on existing visual design items used by others." He also has to ensure that the aesthetics he used were not stuck in the cliched past, "but rather, indicative of new trends and forward motion in design." Pots talks about Campbell's interpretation of a mythic symbol and relates mythic symbols to design elements: "His interpretation is that the symbol should be 'transparent to transcendence': In other words, it should allow us to take the symbol in, and allow ourselves to not get stuck on the symbol itself, but rather what the symbol points to." Ultimately, Pots fully acknowledges that the most important aspect of all of this is whether or not the final design speaks for itself and actually works. "In the end, if the final product doesn't do its job, then all this talk about inspiration and process doesn't really matter."

Although his process is alive with notions of mythological theory and visual philosophy, it can be summed up quite simply: "My process for all new sites starts like this: get a vague, abstract idea of the vision I want to achieve. Next, look for examples of sites using similar visuals. Next, I organize my inspiration into an Illustrator file. Collectively, the goal is to use these elements as a springboard to create something alive and new." Here is a look at the initial inspiration board he created for our current site design:

Pots was in the fortunate position of having a substantial amount of time to devote to this particular redesign project. He admits that in general, the constraint of time can often reduce the scale of each step in his process. "I think a big challenge as a growing designer is to realize that every site can't be the most-epic-process-ever-omg." And when he is under restrictive time constraints he finds that, "Ultimately, communicating with clients to rein in their design expectations" is important.

Pots’s creative talents revealed themselves at an early age. Long before he started with Intridea, he drew Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for his classmates' trapper keepers in the third grade. Always inspired by his older brother, whose drawings he loved, he started drawing when he was very young; "Sketchbooks were the medium of those days. Tons of blank pages." He had a habit of doing each new drawing on a random blank page in the sketchbook; "The idea of going through the pages in linear order was the opposite of my instincts. In a sense, this made finding a new blank page kinda tough when the book began to get full, but it was still the way I enjoyed doing it. I had to find the right blank page for my drawing at that particular moment." He loved drawing cartoonish war and battle scenes over ocean backgrounds, complete with battleships, attacking planes, helicopters, and submarines. Much of the drawings in his later years were inspired by the backstories for his favorite video games like Dragon Warrior, The Legend of Zelda, and Diablo.

In between drawing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for his third grade classmates and working at Intridea, he grew up in suburban Maryland where he loved exploring the forests, playing video games, piano and ice hockey. Pots went to college at the University of Maryland where he started out as a Computer Science major. He had done some programming in high-school as an extension of his gaming hobby. "One useful side effect of all the PC gaming was getting comfortable with DOS. I quickly grew comfortable learning basic command line stuff." He had several PASCAL and C++ classes in high school. "As much as we coded, we also learned how to get around the computer lab’s security codes so we could play Quake 2 on the LAN." But he wasn’t in the Computer Science program very long; "After 3 months I firmly decided to quit that major; it was lifeless to me. Not in a judgmental sense, but rather on a personal level: at that time in my life, it too closely represented the path of non-discovery."

Pots majored in American Studies which gave him the flexibility to focus on sociology and music. "Sociology allowed me to continue learning about different global situations and introduced me to my budding interest in tribal religion, which grew into a passion for comparative mythology." His music major allowed him to deepen his understanding of music theory after playing piano for ten years and augmented his passion for playing guitar, which he claims was his "unofficial major" in college.

After graduating, Pots worked waiting tables, playing gigs at local bars and coffee shops, and devoted a lot of free time to creative writing. It wasn’t long though before he realized he needed a "real" job, and he got hired with the Chesapeake Research Consortium. "That gig had me handling various tasks, including maintaining a website. Best of all, they had a training budget. I could buy books dedicated to HTML, CSS, Photoshop and Illustrator. This was heaven." He looked to sources on the web like Zen Garden for guidance as he taught himself the gentle art of of web design. As he learned Illustrator and Photoshop, he discovered ways to take characters from his creative writing and put them into visual form. His creative writing not only inspired his art, but it also motivated him to re-approach guitar from a new perspective: "I became interested in the possibilities of writing esoteric folk songs, instead of just playing what people in coffee shops wanted to hear."

After working at CRC for a few years, he started freelancing on the side. "I was taken by the web possibilities and how it could be translated into a career. I freelanced for about a year, and did everything you see here:

He spent a year doing freelance work before he ran into Chris Selmer, Senior Partner at Intridea while he was at a DC tech event. "I was hired shortly thereafter. It was a dream," he reflects.

It didn’t take anyone long to discover how talented Potsiadlo was. In addition to rolling out our new website design, he has been busy designing for several client projects, including EarthAid and HowAboutWe. He works from his home in Maryland where he lives with his wife, Shannon, and their baby girl, Norah. He enjoys working at his home office, but admits that he really loves working in coffeeshops too: "Sitting in chairs previously used by others doing their own respective work, drinking from mugs once used by others while doing likewise. The ambience of creativity in these settings is one of my favorite things. I think my favorite encapsulation of all this comes from this TED talk (author Elizabeth Gilbert, on creativity and genius.)"

Though he certainly loves music, he prefers to listen to podcasts while he works. "I think podcasts represent an awesome realm of creative use of the internet." His favorites include Leo LaPorte’s TWiT.tv network, the sports and pop-culture ramblings of Bill Simmons, and geeked-out movie conversations on The /Filmcast. When he's not having fun with his family or being creative with music, images or language, he enjoys doing work in his home's garden and watching sports on the TV.

Potsiadlo could be considered a Homo Universalis, a modern day Renaissance man. From his clever sketchings, to the intricate songs he plays on guitar and piano, to ice hockey, to his interests in global issues, to his love of comparative mythology, to creative writing, to the art that he creates for the web. It’s hard to believe so much talent can come from one human being. Then again, Pablo Picasso may have said it best when he reminds us that the artist is not just a set of eyes or ears, but a political being:

"What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he is a painter, or his ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet, or, if he is merely a boxer, only his muscle? On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heartrending, burning, or happy events in the world, molding himself in their likeness."

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

Acts-as-taggable-on, subdomain-fu, tweetstream, seed-fu, oauth2, and multi_json. What do all of these open source projects have in common? Why, Michael Bleigh, of course! This week, meet our Creative Director, Michael: expert programmer, prolific designer, and open source crusader.

In his three years at Intridea, Michael has created a staggering number of open source solutions for Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers. His contributions to our community are noteworthy and it is for this reason that I start off the interview by asking him about his inspiration and passion for open source software and development. For Michael, it was simple: "I saw people doing cool things and thought, hey, I want to be like those people!".

His first (and most popular) project was acts-as-taggable-on, "a tagging plugin for Rails applications that allows for custom tagging along dynamic contexts". Michael says that the project came about because, "I really needed the functionality, and I was able to get it by modifying an existing plugin. I rewrote it and then I figured, well, I should release this. Instantly, I was hooked." He has created over twenty open source projects since he started with Intridea, and cites several of them as personal favorites, such as subdomain-fu: "Lots of people were making Rails apps with subdomains and everyone seemed to be complaining about it. This one just took a lot of hard work and perseverance reading Rails internals to make it work right, and once it was done, subdomains just worked."

Most recently, he has been working with OAuth2; "I've really gotten interested in these open standards, and when OAuth 2.0 came out I was happy to be able to write the first Ruby library for it."

As our internal open source pioneer, Michael spends a lot of time focusing on creating these open source tools. But he doesn't just create open source solutions; he also points out that he uses dozens of open source projects every day. It might sounds like a high number, but Michael explains, "Anyone who develops for Rails is using a ton of open source projects. Every gem in your Rails app is someone's hard work, sweat and tears." Michael contends that more developers should make time to develop or work on open source software. "I've always wanted to give a sort of open source cheerleader talk at one of these conferences. It's so easy, there's no reason everyone can't do it."

Michael is equally a programmer and a designer. From an early age he had a passion for both computing and gaming, as well as drawing. "I really enjoyed cartooning. I used to do dead-on Penny Arcade art style as well as a decent anime style. My freshman year of college I had a webcomic called 'Fun With Sharpies' that were just hastily drawn Sharpie comics." He has even contemplated starting a weekly webcomic for Intridea.

As a designer, he laments the lack of design talent in the open source community. "Apple has a monopoly on pretty graphics with a POSIX shell (though the new Ubuntu is nice). I'd love to find a way to encourage more designers to get involved with open source and make things that cause Cupertino to be jealous instead of the other way around." Michael admits that although he makes every attempt to use open-source software, he still uses proprietary software. Mac OS X is his primary operating system due largely to the availability of Adobe's design tools. Michael does his best to try to bridge the gap between designers and the open source community; "I've created some open source projects with a UI, like my Twitter client for Google Chrome, but I'd like to do more."

He notes a barrier to entry for open source design: "I think that coders can understand the open source process more easily. We deal with version control and team development all the time, but designers aren't used to that. There needs to be a channel of communication and encouragement."

A good example of Michael's exceptional talent as both designer and developer can be seen in his RailsConf 2010 presentation, "The Present Future of OAuth". "It's a subject that lots of people find confusing and boring, so making the slides fun helped keep it lively and explain things in simpler terms." He enjoyed working with simple illustrations styled after the Zero Punctuation reviews. "Embracing constraints (like block people with circles for hands and logos for heads) can be really rewarding. My favorite slide is the one where OAuth 1.0 is looking down at the ground... I feel like it conveys a dejected emotion really well; getting emotion to translate within such constraints is a fun challenge."

Michael has given a number of presentations at conferences around the world. But, surprisingly, he's a pretty shy and timid guy. "I'm not the most extroverted guy, I love to meet new people but I'm not always great at striking up conversations. That's why I love speaking at conferences." He hopes to be able to speak as early as possible at the conference so that he'll have a "jumping off point" for conversation. Michael has always enjoyed speaking; he was a member of the debate team in high school where he grew up in Olathe, KS and participated in mock trial in college at Georgia Tech.

Although Michael is well known for his open source contributions, he spends most of his time working on internal products and client work at Intridea. He most enjoys working on products; "I have all these ideas in my head and it kills me not to be constantly making them a reality." In the coming year, Michael will be leading a structured team of our internal product developers to help bring innovative ideas to fruition.

Though it may seem that he never stops working, Michael has a great life outside of the office too. He recently married his high school sweetheart. "Morgan sat next to me in a history class my junior year for reasons beyond even her understanding. I already liked her, but was too shy to say anything." Michael was pretty surprised when she agreed to go to the movies with him for the first time. "We went to see 'The Mothman Prophecies'. I was so inexperienced with dating that I didn't know that I should have picked her up and that there should have been dinner involved." But as fate would have it, she fell in love with him despite his lack of knowledge in courtship. Now he is ecstatic to be married to his "best friend"; the brilliant woman who reads manga and plays video games with him and loves zombies even more than he does. They are under contract for their first house, a loft in downtown Kansas City, and he says that one of the first things they are going to do is "get a 6'x4' matisse-style artwork of the Left 4 Dead zombies made to hang in the new loft."

He speaks so highly of his wife that it might be hard to believe there is another woman in his life that he adores: his Pomeranian/Papillon mix dog, Zoey. "She is 10 pounds, and she acts more like a stuffed animal than a dog. She warms my feet while I code."

Michael and his wife enjoy watching movies, especially going to the movie theater. "I will often want to go to the movies (and drag Morgan there) for its own sake, not because there's anything out I even remotely want to see. There's something about setting everything else aside and just experiencing someone else's story for a few hours. Watching movies at home there are too many distractions." He also enjoys "standup comedy and concerts in seedy bars." His favorite artist is Ben Folds, and he has been to seven of his shows (eight in July and five with his wife). He jokes, "Ben Folds Five was my first concert ever, back in the mid '90s. So my musical taste has really evolved."

Maybe it's true that his musical taste hasn't evolved, but Michael has certainly evolved as both a designer and developer. He has made great use of his time at Intridea between his open source contributions, his product ideas and developments, and the speed and accuracy with which he can develop client projects. It's no mistake that he so widely known and appreciated in our community. He works relentlessly to follow through on projects, and has a passion for quality and excellence that is hard to match. What can I say, we love him!

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

He runs really, really fast. He can live without sleep. And his first memory of a computer comes from playing Zork in the 4th grade. He's our Senior Partner, Co-Founder and valiant leader of client services. Meet Chris Selmer in this week's Intridea Insider.

Chris graduated from college with a degree in Mathematics, but not before considering several different majors, including Exercise Science, Chemistry and Physics. Although his first job during (and after) college was writing PHP for a web design studio in DC, he wasn't formally trained in web development. "I minored in CS, but everything I learned for the web was self-taught."

Chris discovered the world of Ruby while he was at an Intro to Ajax class, offered by the Pragmatic Studio. "A lot of people were talking about how Ruby had great ajax shortcuts built in." His interest was piqued and shortly thereafter he began using Ruby on Rails professionally; "I started doing some Ruby on Rails work and some ColdFusion development for the Academic Technologies department at George Washington University. Our department was in charge of classroom technology and researching innovative new ways to use technology in the classrooms."

His position at GWU was able to benefit the Ruby community in DC; when he met Dave Naffis, (also a co-founder and Senior Partner at Intridea), Dave was looking for a place to host the DCRUG. Chris was able to find him a space at GWU and he has been helping to organize the DCRUG event ever since, with help from fellow Intridean, Joe Grossberg.

Intridea was in its infancy at the time Chris came on board in 2007. He spent the majority of his time programming in Ruby on Rails for clients, but at the same time he was working hard to bring in some big, new projects. It wasn't long before he found himself running the services wing of the company. In 2007 Intridea was a start-up company of only eight employees. We've since grown to nearly 50 employees in three years, and Chris played a pivotal role in that growth by acquiring and managing a lot of projects from awesome clients.

Chris is known as the "Intridean that never sleeps". He makes time to nap and eat when he must, but he's a work-force to be reckoned with. "I tend to do my most productive work from around 11pm - 2am, just because there are fewer distractions that demand my attention. So I'll often sleep 2-5 hours at night and then have a couple of 20-minutes naps during the day." Most of us marvel at how he can be so productive on so little sleep, but Chris's Mom (and fellow Intridean), Kathleen Selmer, reveals that he never slept much as a child either; "He was always too busy to sleep. In high school, he ran cross country and indoor/outdoor track, and was captain of the teams from sophomore-senior years. He won several state championships. He was also involved in a few school plays." She also raves about how intelligent Chris is; " Chris was always an avid reader from the time he started to read. I would say he found school unchallenging. He got good grades, but didn't have to work too hard for them. He relied on a great recall of information."

Chris was born at home in Green Meadows, Maryland with the assistance of a midwife and is the oldest of four children. He spent a good portion of his youth playing with his brothers and sister on their 6 acres of land in Pennsylvania. "About half of our land was wooded, so we spent lots of time making tree forts and running around wild." Chris now lives in Takoma Park, MD. He prefers to work in his basement office, where his Mac Pro lives. He met his wife, Stephanie, on Match.com; "She was the first person I contacted, and we had a near-instant connection. She is really awesome." Stephanie works at NIH and is pursuing a Masters in Public Health at College Park. In addition, she finds time to take care of their two dogs, three cats and her husband.

Before I sat down with Chris for this interview, several fellow Intrideans wanted me to ask Chris whether he misses coding now that he's in a management role and a Senior Partner; "I miss getting in the zone and having hours pass by just writing code." Even though Chris isn't doing much coding anymore these days, he enjoys being able to kickstart meaningful projects, like Tradui and Oil Reporter. Plus, he likes solving client problems; "Solving problems was one of the things I really liked about coding, but it's just done on a different scale now."

Chris has a side dream of one day being able to buy old houses and fix them up for a living. He got a chance to do one a few years ago and looks forward to doing it again some day. But until that days comes, we need him here at Intridea, as our unwavering, super-human battle-hardened leader of client services.

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

Inspired by his grandpa from a young age to be the best he can be, Jonathan is a true innovator; his mind is always alight with new ideas and ways to execute on them. He brings his passion for innovation to Intridea as our Product Manager. Meet Jonathan Nelson, in this week's Intridea Insider.

Jonathan brings fire, optimism and enthusiasm to the team: three vital ingredients that not only help to keep the rest of us inspired, but also make him astoundingly adept at marketing, business development, product design and development, and managing ideas and innovation. He does a little of everything, (ok, a lot of everything) and never seems to tire. His passion to be the best he can be is always driving him to work harder, for the benefit of us all.

Lately, Jonathan has been working on our enterprise microblogging solution, Presently. He has also been busy with Oil Reporter, a mobile app that gives people in the affected areas of the oil spill a way to create data reports (including geo-tagged photos and videos) of what they're seeing. All the data is available to the public and urgent reports are sent to CrisisCommons, who then shares the data with organizations and agencies that are dedicated to the cleanup effort.

While Jonathan is busy designing and developing products, he says he's also looking for ways to "increase exposure and drive business through various existing and new channels." Before becoming an Intridean, he spent many years working for high-profile companies like Shopzilla, and Primedia.

In fact, he first learned about Ruby while he was working at Shopzilla: "I was charged with coming up with, leading and developing technologies to drive more traffic to their site." Shopzilla was using Perl to run their systems. Jonathan had been hearing a lot about Ruby at the time from the tech community in California, and he decided to teach himself Ruby; "I dove right into it. It was love at first sight. I was so amazed that I couldn't stop telling and pleading with my engineer friends at Shopzilla to try it out." Not only did he get Shopzilla to start using Ruby, but when he later went to work with Primedia, he also convinced them to switch to Ruby from .NET.

Jonathan left Shopzilla to join Primedia after proposing to his (then) girlfriend, Ashley; she lived in Georgia and was still in college, so he left his 400 sq ft apartment on West Sunset Blvd and traded in the energetic startup lifestyle for an equally awesome job at Primedia and joined Ashley in Buford, Georgia.

Although he spent many years in business development and strategy for tech companies, Jonathan always loved programming: "I enjoy creating new things, and making my ideas become a reality." So eventually, the desire to code overcame him and he left Primedia to create his own app for Twitter, called TwitterMass. "The idea was simple, really. Create LinkedIn type functionality, but for Twitter." He knew he was taking a leap of faith, but argues, "I knew if I didn't do it now, I never would." He was able to market the application and got it running virally. TwitterMass had nearly 10k users in the first three months. The success of that app inspired him to create another app, Tweet Blocker, and he sold both applications before joining the Intridea team.

As skilled as he is at marketing, strategy, product design, development, and innovation, Jonathan wasn't supposed to be a developer or Product Manager at all. After finishing high school in Seattle, he joined the Air Force, with the intention of flying fighters and then retiring to fly private or commercial jets. His career path changed after 9/11; "I was in the Air National Guard when 9/11 happened, and due to training orders being changed, I had a lot of flexibility with my schedule; so I decided to direct my energy toward programming and other tech-related passions." During his high-school years, he was preoccupied with dissecting and then recreating internet sites that he visited frequently, in an effort to understand how sites were built and how the web worked. "When I got back in the swing of things (after 9/11) I couldn't stop reading and learning. I learned Perl, JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and even some PHP."

Aside from a few CS classes, Jonathan taught himself everything he knows. As a kid he had even taught himself to play drums and piano. That's just the kind of guy he is. When he feels inspired to do something, he makes it happen and nothing stands in his way. He says that the ideas of Napoleon Hill, as expressed in his book, "Think and Grow Rich", helped to teach him tried and true methods to achieving success.

Jonathan balances his work life with a strong family life and spiritual life. He spends lots of time with his wife, Ashley, whom he praises for her incredible photography, and their two adorable sons, Noah and Caleb. "Being a Dad is the best thing ever. It helps me to keep pushing myself. I feel like I have so much work to do, because I want to leave a legacy with my kids that continues even when I'm gone. I want to instill good character and a thirst for knowledge in them."

He enjoys listening to classical and jazz music in his office while he works, and makes a point to go to concerts in the Summer. He goes to comedy shows when the opportunity arises, and even had some stage time at a Dane Cook show. He works hard (there is even a bed in his office for the nights that he works late) and then balances that by playing hard too.

Jonathan brings genuine ingenuity and vitality to our team. He loves working, and he's not afraid to push himself. We're grateful to have him on board with us, and it seems that he likes us too; "I just have this gut feeling about Intridea. It's the best company I've ever worked for. The ability to work from home means that I get to give my son a hug and kiss when I come upstairs for coffee during the day. That's priceless."

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

This week in the Intridea Insider, meet Thadd Selden, our Project Manager and Scrum Master.

Thadd's experience in Project Management is rooted in years of working on government contracts at companies like Raytheon. He studied Math and Physics and minored in Astrophysics and French in college, but his career in programming was initiated when he was recruited by a Navy research lab after his sophomore year at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, VA. "They took me on for the summer and that's where I learned to program. Their philosophy was that it was easier to teach physicists coding than the other way around; so I spent my first two weeks (while waiting for my security clearance to come in before I could even log on to the system) reading C and FORTRAN books."

Thadd worked as a civilian scientist for the research lab while teaching himself different programming languages. "Most of my job was doing code archaeology on ancient algorithms written by a guy who retired a few years earlier." He was migrating the codebase from FORTRAN to C, and later to C++; "I offered to do a trial of it in C++ to see how it worked and everyone got on board." And because he was working on a classified system, "We couldn't download anything to it; so if we needed a tool, we had to write it." So he wrote things like calendar programs and chat clients. "Everything was usually written in nasty combinations of shell scripts, Motif, etc. I even wrote a whole to-do application in awk. We used to build GUI apps in Matlab even if they had nothing to do with our algorithms, just because that was the only easy UI toolkit we had."

Even now, Thadd still writes his own tools when he needs to. For example, he's been using a combination of Pivotal Tracker and Unfuddle at Intridea and made a way to import tickets from one to the other: "We like Unfuddle, but when we need to prioritize tasks against each other, we have to use Pivotal. So I wrote a little script that lets us import our Unfuddle tickets into Pivotal, which makes things a lot easier."

Although he was learning a lot at the research lab, Thadd battled with personal conflicts between being a pacifist and working on a nuclear weapons program. "I actually remember the exact moment that things changed for me: I was building a simulator that loaded terrain data from massive data files and I needed to know if I had north/south setup properly. So the solution was to load up New York in the simulator and go based on the buildings that were recognizable. It hit me when I realized I had just run a targeting sim, and there on my screen, were the Twin Towers."

That pivotal moment got Thadd working on his resumé. He got a call from Raytheon to go work on their unmanned vehicle programs, which weighed less on his conscience; "That was easier for me since it was all surveillance and they had some peace-time uses too." Not only was Thadd writing the control software for the vehicles that the pilots on the ground used, but he also was part of a startup R&D team at Raytheon that was charged with doing accelerated development and proofs of concept for new ideas and technologies.

I actually remember the exact moment that things changed for me: I was building a simulator that loaded terrain data from massive data files and I needed to know if I had north/south setup properly. So the solution was to load up New York in the simulator and go based on the buildings that were recognizable. It hit me when I realized I had just run a targeting sim, and there on my screen, were the Twin Towers.

As one of the tech leads on those projects, he began to get into agile development and processes. "Since Raytheon was a big company and did mostly government contracts, we had to have formal process; but we quickly realized that the traditional waterfall process wouldn't work for our team or our products. So we spent a lot of time working on developing agile process definitions and educating management and other teams on our lessons learned." Surprisingly, the government was on board with the agile development; it was Raytheon that he fought to convince: "They were so used to seeing the exact metrics and charts that they were used to, that trying to convince them that a project was on track with other data was a huge headache."

Thadd, now a certified Scrum master, is our agile evangelist. He discovered Intridea when he found himself in dire need of a company that would allow him to work remotely. "My wife is a college professor, and when she started a new tenure-track position here in Wilkes-Barre we had to relocate." Raytheon allowed Thadd to work remotely for a while, but eventually it became too hard to be the only remote worker on the team. Since most of our development team is distributed Thadd jumped at the opportunity to join us.

Thadd has been spending most of his time at Intridea leading a team of developers on a huge project for a gaming website, written in Ruby on Rails. He taught himself RoR when it first came onto the scene. "I was deep into the enterprise-y stuff when RoR came out, and PHP just didn't fit well for bigger projects at the time. I liked the idea of using model-view-controller for web development." He started building some small personal projects in RoR, and even used it a little bit at Raytheon; "There is now a RoR server running onboard an unmanned airplane." Although Thadd has used many different programming languages over the years, he loves Ruby the most; "I love that literally everything is an object. Other object-oriented languages half-ass it, but the fact that you can say 4.times in Ruby kicks ass."

One of our Senior Engineers, Joe Grossberg, asks Thadd how he keeps his programming skills so sharp now that he's a PM and Scrum guru: "I have to know my way around the code really well because I'm always doing deployments and configuration. Also, I have to know how the code is structured so I can process all the bugs and features requests from the client." In addition, sometimes he will code up small features or fix small bugs himself if it's easier than pulling a dev off a task. "This project is so big and complicated, especially with all the various stakeholders. But the Intridea developers are so great that they make my job easy."

Thadd loves programming, but his computer hobby began with hardware when a family friend introduced him to BBSes and AOL when he was in middle school. He learned how to build and fix computers, and even tinkered with Linux early in college. "I bought a domain name and set up a simple box in the Society of Physics student's lounge." As a teenager he was mostly interested in discovering how he could use software as a means to an end, like using lighting software in high school plays, as the Tech Director. "My Mom was a graphic artist and my step-father was a published expert on Postscript and Photoshop. So I was involved in the desktop publishing side of things too for awhile in high school." He credits his early experience with desktop publishing for giving him a "more critical eye for usability."

These days, Thadd works exclusively on Macs but he still tinkers with Linux from time to time. When Thadd isn't working, he makes time to enjoy sailing; "My main passion is sailing. I grew up spending a lot of time around boats and I still love it." He says that the lack of good sailing in Wilkes-Barre is problematic, but he keeps himself busy with hiking, reading Sci-Fi, practicing Kung Fu, and hanging out with his wife and their three dogs and four cats.

What does Thadd love most about working for Intridea? "Working on a challenging project and leading a talented team of developers. It's also great to be able to work out on my deck, which I get to do whenever the weather is nice." During the winter, he hibernates in his office down in the basement, which gives him the opportunity to "build a nice warm fire." It's a different life from the pressure of writing software for unmanned vehicles and nuclear weapons simulations. And different is good.

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

This week in the Intridea Insider, meet Adam Bair, our Director of Development.

Adam was born to hack. At the age of three he started taking apart electronic equipment to see how things worked and before he was eight he was building intricate Lego Technic creations, like cars that had four-cylinder engines with moving pistons and suspension systems. By the time he was a teenager, he was making lineman's handsets to tap into and test phone lines.

What truly sparked his passion for technology, though, was video games. "I started gaming with text adventure games on BBS's and became obsessed with PC gaming when games like Wolfenstein and Doom were introduced." Back then, there was much leg-work to be done in order to support a hardcore gaming hobby. "For example, I had to learn how my modem worked so I could play Doom with a friend by dialing into his modem directly over a phone line." He even went so far as to replace the telephone lines running to his house: "I had to make sure I had the fastest, cleanest connection. The lines get fragile over time from exposure to the elements, and that can affect the speed and quality of the connection."

Adam thinks back to those days with nostalgia; "Today, someone can be a 'gamer' and not necessarily (or even likely) be a geek. But back then, you had to be a geek in order to be a gamer. Those were the 'good old days'. I would stay up all through the night, playing around with old Linux distros, reading about electronics, reading 2600 magazines, connecting to BBS's and gaming. When my Mom woke up at 5 in the morning for work, we'd have coffee together before I went to bed." I asked Adam about his 2600 magazines, and he explained why they were an important resource to him back then; "We didn't have Google then for all the answers. We also didn't have laptops and iPhones and iPads; 2600 gave us mobile access to tech information."

After college, Adam worked several sysadmin jobs but he was always finding a way to program. "Every place I worked at, I got bored with working on hardware, so I started writing software to automate the stuff I did. For example, when a user left the company, terminating their access to the systems they had privileges on could take up to an hour. So I wrote scripts to go in and handle most of that work for me. I started off writing small, useful scripts in Perl and bash -- even some command-line PHP -- but it felt inelegant."

Adam discovered Ruby when he was poking around at Borders one afternoon. "I was just looking around in the computer section, and I saw "the pickaxe book" ("Programming Ruby"). I browsed through it and thought, 'I have to try this out.' It was similar to Perl, but it was sold on elegance and programmer happiness, which was just what I was looking for." He gushes, "I never loved programming like I did once I discovered Ruby. In college I thought I would be a hardware guy forever; I guess Visual Basic will do that to a person." He was determined to learn Ruby and began by replacing all of his old scripts with Ruby ones.

Adam was working as a sysadmin for a small healthcare company in southern Maine. "I happened to watch the 'Build a blog in 15 minutes' video from DHH and that got me really excited about Rails. Its philosophy values elegant simplicity and using it meant that I could write web apps in Ruby, so I quickly learned Rails."

A few months later, he saw that Big Nerd Ranch was offering one of the first Rails classes in the US and it was a 7 day course, taught by Marcel Molina who was then a core contributor to Rails and a 37 Signals employee.

His company paid for the training, and Adam soon found himself in the middle of the humid woods of Georgia for a week, learning from one of the brightest luminaries in the Ruby and Rails community, at the beginning of the Rails surge. "Not only was I learning Rails, but I was actually talking to professional software developers. That was a big deal for me, because everyone else in my circle were hardware people and I never had the opportunity to work alongside other programmers. So here I was, talking to guys that worked for the government, and for Pixar Animation Studios, who were using Ruby to manage their build scripts on their rendering farms. It was a turning point for me, because I realized there was this whole other world out there, with programmers in it."

"We were expecting our first baby, and Renae wanted to be a stay-at-home Mom. We came to the realization that a sysadmin's salary in Maine would not be able to support that lifestyle." So Adam started looking for higher-paying jobs and ended up sending his résumé to Revolution Health. "I was sure no one would call me back," but he got a call the next day and they asked him to fly down to their office in DC that week for an interview.

After his interview, Adam strolled around the National Mall for the first time before his flight back home to Maine. He hadn't made it back to the airport before Revolution called him with a job offer. "Here I was, a country boy that had never traveled, in the nation's capital. I was seeing things that I had only seen in movies. And then I get a job offer, with a salary that was three times what I was making in Maine. It felt like I won the lottery. I still do feel that way about my life, even now. It's pretty awesome."

Adam learned about Rails development at lightning speed during his time at Revolution. The codebase was massive, and there was little room for error. Adam was put in charge of the home page, the most highly visible portion of the site. "The only reason I became really good so fast was because I was working some brilliant developers at Revolution; I learned so much from guys like Todd Fisher, Aaron Batalion, Svante Adermark and Eddie Frederick. They had an amazing drive for excellence and delivery and they knew the source code inside and out."

When he interviewed at Intridea a year later, Adam was already well-trained in software development and comfortable working with large teams of developers with tight deadlines. "I loved working at Revolution. But the 90-minute commute each way was killing me. I barely saw my daughter, Serenity, for the first year of her life, between work, commuting and social activities with Revolution. So I found Intridea and sent them my résumé; I liked their site, their philosophy and they were located in DC. And as a bonus, they allowed all of their employees to work from home."

The reality that he was a talented developer was slowly setting in; "It blew my mind when Dave hired me. Up until that point I thought that getting hired at Revolution as a developer was just luck, but then it happened again. It felt like a 'Cinderella story,' to quote Caddy Shack:"

"Cinderella story. Outta nowhere. A former greenskeeper, now, about to become the Masters champion. It looks like a mirac... It's in the hole! It's in the hole! It's in the hole!"

I asked Adam how the work at Intridea differs from the work he did at Revolution. "We have smaller teams with a lot more trust. There's no bureaucracy or red tape feeling. Things just get done the right way without a lot of fuss. I've been working on small projects, which means I get exposure to more codebases." In addition, he gets to work with a lot of experts; "We all work remotely, and that requires a different kind of person. People that work remotely have to be really dedicated, driven and talented, and we all are."

Adam's specialty is taking on "rescue projects," so he's often working on fixing broken code; it's his niche, like Winston Wolfe from Pulp Fiction. "I go in and clean up messes that we inherit. I'm good at it, and I enjoy fixing things."

Although most Intrideans work remotely, they certainly don't work alone. Adam travels to DC frequently to the Intridea office, and meets up with other Intrideans when he is in town. "We're in constant contact through IMs, Skype and Present.ly. Intridea is well-represented at most conferences, and since there are so many of us that do speaking engagements we get to see each other whenever we go to conferences."

Adam raves that Intridea is truly an awesome company to work for, especially with the freedom that he is afforded as a remote worker. At lunchtime he walks upstairs and enjoys lunch with his children, Serenity, Sébastien and Séraphin. "I work hard, and I work a lot. But working here has actually given me so much more time with my family, and I'm always grateful for that." Adam is fortunate, and he knows it. "I'm not in the rat race anymore; I don't sit in traffic for hours a day, pay tolls and use gas to commute. I get to listen to dubstep while I code all day, and I don't even have to wear headphones."

Adam is a Vim user and evangelist. "I used TextMate for a short time, until I realized that future versions were essentially vaporware or questionable at best. I used Vim back in college and for sysadmin work, so I went back to my roots. Using Vim decouples you from the mouse, a tool that really slows you down. The sound of someone flying along in Vim is like the hymns of angels. It's beautiful, and it's how a computer should be operated. If you think of hacker movies, what are they doing? They're not pushing a piece of plastic around on a desk. They're mashing keys. That's how it's done."

To what does he attribute his good fortune? "A combination of drive and luck: I was born at the right time. The internet was just starting to become mainstream, and I have a very technical mind. If I weren't working on computers, I'd be doing something just as technical like working on engines, or building things, or maybe blacksmithing if I lived in another time."

He also gives much credit to his parents: "They gave me so much freedom to explore and to do my thing. They saw the potential of what was happening with me. I was unaware, even in college. I was just doing what I liked to do. I wasn't even thinking about a career until after I got out of college, which was probably why I nearly starved for the first year after graduation." But it didn't take Adam long to find his path to developer bliss.

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

This week on the Intridea Insider, meet Maggie Lubberts, QA Manager at Intridea. Her favorite color in kindergarten was "clear", her brother is a cage fighter, she majored in English, and she actually likes living in Kansas! This might be one of our most interesting Insider editions yet!

Maggie studied English in college and although she loves writing and reading (sci-fi and fantasy, mostly), what she loved most about English was editing: "I wanted to be an editor, because I love taking what other people have already made and then making it better." She says that her love for editing combined with her perfectionism is "great for this kind of job. Not many people would spend 5 minutes ticketing a slight misalignment of a button if it's off by 3 pixels. Who's gonna notice that? ME!"

After finishing college, Maggie began working at T-Mobile, in a tech and customer support role. She worked there until last summer when Michael Bleigh, referred her to Intridea for a QA position. "Michael knew how much I was on the computer, hacking my iphone, and basically self educating to make my stuff better. He heard that Intridea was looking for a QA person, and he connected the dots." Now Maggie has her "dream job" and she's always pinching herself to confirm the reality of it all.

Maggie already had the right personality and talent for QA, and she was able to quickly teach herself the tools for the job. Now she has a really solid process established.

Here is her basic QA bug ticketing process, in her words:

• I take a screenshot of the problem with Skitch.
• I mark it up with giant arrows in obnoxious colors as a form of stress relief, and so that the dev trying to fix the problem will be able to easily tell what they're fixing.
• Then I create a ticket, and come up with a name for it; I include the URL and embedded screenshot along with a description and then set any indicators like which browser and operating system I am using.
• The devs come behind me and fix the errors and then mark them as "resolved" in our system.
• Finally, I go back after they've released the new code and "verify and close" those tickets to make sure the problem was really fixed.

Maggie uses Unfuddle for ticketing (and sometimes Pivotal Tracker, depending on the project). She also uses an app called Test Run, as a focused tool for test case management. She often finds herself reading two of her favorite QA blogs for support and insight, Testingreflections.com and QAInsight.net. She has been doing long-term QA work on Present.ly and a large gaming site. Recently, she has been working on HowAboutWe, a fresh dating site for one of our clients. Maggie is also in charge of support for a number of our internal products, and uses Zendesk for the majority of her communication with users requesting help.

Before my interview with Maggie, I sent out an update to the team in Present.ly, asking people what they wanted to know about her. Joe Grossberg wanted to know about one of the craziest QA experiences that she's had. Maggie shared a story about button confusion: "Once, a dev had forgotten to change the text for a button: it should have said 'disable', but instead it said 'DESTROY!' (not my emphasis). I had a customer write in concerned (really concerned) about what would happen if she were to click the "destroy" button."

Joe also wanted to know what it was like for Maggie to work "that remotely"; he was no doubt referring to her location out in Kansas. So I talked to Maggie a lot about Kansas and why she loves it there. She describes Douglas County as "the liberal mecca for Kansas" and she spoke about the cohesive community in her town of Lawrence (home of the Kansas University Jayhawks). She lives across the street from a farmer's market and says that the people in her town make it a point to contribute to the community by eating local, volunteering, and supporting each other's businesses. "When I moved to Lawrence I saw what a town could be if people supported local businesses. All I knew from the town I grew up in was Walmart and Target, Hummers and chain food. Only the 'poor people' did garage sales, and no one knows their neighbors. Every cool person in Kansas lives here. Appreciating my blessings aplenty and giving back has been easy here because there are plenty of opportunities to do good."

I know that you're thinking that Lawrence, Kansas couldn't sound any cooler, but wait for it: during our interview, Maggie was missing the Adult Swim block party in her neighborhood. "Apparently you can win inflatable meatwads. INFLATABLE MEATWADS!!" Maggie didn't win an inflatable meatwad, but she was able to go join the party after our interview.

She isn't lonely in Kansas. Maggie lives with her partner, Stephy and their three dogs. They have a garden and love to cook together. Her family also lives there, and she visits them often. She loves playing with her nieces and nephews, and prides herself on being "Cool Aunt Maggie". She thrives on social interaction, so she depends heavily on our Present.ly app to feel "connected" to the other Intrideans. She admits that "it's hard not being able to see the people I work with, but luckily our company built an awesome tool that helps! With Present.ly I'm able to get the "water cooler" talk that you get in an office, and I can get to know the people I work with daily, even if it isn't face to face."

In high school and in college she was involved in extra-curricular programs like debate, forensics and Mock Trial Competitive Speaking. "It was fun being around a bunch of like-minded people with awesome interests on a day-to-day basis". Her grandma was once the English teacher and debate coach at the high school she attended, so she was able to learn debate and English skills early on. "When I was little my favorite game was the "National Geographic Game", where I'd read out loud to my grandma from the National Geographic until I found a word I couldn't pronounce or define and then I'd have to figure it out. It sounds lame, but it was so much fun for me because I loved learning."

And she still does love learning. The successful transition from her tech support job at T-Mobile to a QA position at Intridea is proof of that. She worked diligently to learn the skills and tools necessary to be great at what she does. She loves the challenge of hunting down bugs, and nothing is worse to her than when someone comes in behind her and finds something that she missed. But the fact is that Maggie is so good at what she does, that she was recently promoted to QA Manager. Thinking back to her earlier years when she dreamt of being an editor, I can see how she does so well in QA. In her own words, "I think of it like editing; behind every amazing author is a great copy editor." And behind every great dev, there is a great QA engineer. Fortunately, we have Maggie!

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

This week on the Intridea Insider, meet Brendan Lim, our Director of Mobile Development.

If you're a member of the Ruby on Rails or Mobile Development communities, chances are you've heard of Brendan Lim. He started his career off with a bang after creating Yappd (a Twitter clone with pictures) in 2007 with Brent Collier. Soon after Yappd was acquired by his former employer, Kajeet, Brendan met with Dave Naffis, Senior Partner at Intridea, and began working with the Intridea team after his obligations to Kajeet had been fulfilled.

His last two years at Intridea have not been quiet. He started by helping out with client projects, but his talent for coming up with and creating applications was quickly noticed. Brendan always has fresh ideas and can quickly transform those ideas into working applications. His first endeavor in mobile development with Intridea was to create a mobile version of Present.ly, our microblogging application. Since then he has created several mobile applications, including three apps to help you find the best Curry (iCurry), Pho (iPho) and Sushi (SushiMe) food anywhere using your iPhone.

Brendan's Car Finder app, which makes brilliant use of augmented reality, garnered attention from sources like Wired, boingboing, and Cult of Mac. Time recently mentioned Car Finder in their "10 Tech Trends for 2010" article. And most recently, Brendan created Grub.it, an application to help users find top-notch dishes at their local restaurants, with fellow Intridean, Pradeep Elankumaran.

I asked Brendan how he comes up with product ideas and how those ideas evolve into applications: "Almost every idea I've come up with has been a result of needing a solution to a problem that wasn't already solved, or because I thought I could accomplish something better. For example, the idea for Grub.it surfaced because we wished we could find the best hidden meals in every town. And we came up with Yappd because we wished Twitter had better photo integration at the time." He credits his girlfriend, Edel, with supporting his new app ideas and acting as the first beta tester for most of his applications.

Brendan has been building quality applications at Intridea for the past couple of years, but he has always been gifted with ingenuity. As a young teenager he was heavy into gaming; after his brother introduced him to HTML and web design he created video game review sites like, N64Xtreme and VGamers.com. "I would contact the PR departments of video game publishers and ask to review upcoming titles. I remember for the Nintendo 64, I bought one game and ended up with 50."

Most high school gamers have only dreamt of being able to review games in order to support their gaming hobby. But then Brendan took it about ten steps further when he met some of the people from Gamers.com and was offered a job managing video game pages for several platforms.

Along with his many computer-related hobbies, Brendan was also into video production as a teenager. As a freshman in college, Lexus paid him to make a video of their driving school. You can see some of his recent videos on Vimeo, including this one called Insomnia. He is also a talented photographer, which is a hobby that started with an interest in automotive photography and has now lead to landscape, city, creative, and portrait photography.

Although Brendan was a typical "geek", only several of his close friends were privy to his computer-related hobbies. I asked him why his geekery wasn't made public, and he explained, "I wrestled and played a little football in high school. I'd hang out with my friends for a bit but as soon as I came home I would just stay on my computer. It was where I was most comfortable".

Brendan entered Auburn University in Alabama as a pre-med student, but quickly realized that it wasn't for him. The school had just received funding from the owner of Verizon to start a software engineering program with a focus on wireless technology. The Wireless Software Engineering program was a perfect fit for him, considering his computer background and his love for collecting tiny, unlocked cell phones from overseas.

While Brendan was studying full-time at Auburn University he also had a lot of jobs. "I spent more time working and doing projects than I did studying. I liked teaching myself how to learn new languages by making things on the side." He loved creating solutions to problems even back then: "I created a Rails app for school called Notefad that allowed my friend and I to share and edit notes during class. I'd be terrified to look at the code now, but it was fun and actually helped us out."

But he didn't just create apps to meet his needs as a student; in fact, he built several applications with his friend while he was in college: "We started Freebielance, which was similar to eLance. We also did CheckoutSource which we were developing as a payment gateway. That didn't work out too well. We built it all out, applied for a merchant account, and then realized we couldn't afford it!"

Now, as the Director of Mobile Development, Brendan gets the opportunity to come up with lots of product ideas and to work on apps for several different platforms. Although Brendan started using Rails while he worked at Kajeet with Brent, he now finds himself using a lot of Objective-C, which he claims to love; "I'm actually a big fan of Obj-C. Although, for our client work we're using Appcelerator's Titanium platform. It allows us to develop iPhone and Android apps (fully native) using their JavaScript API. It definitely helps save time by letting us get apps out quicker for multiple platforms using a single code base."

Brendan has an intensity and energy about him that you can see in his work. He gets fired up about an idea and he executes on it flawlessly and without fuss. And when he's not coding like a ninja, or shooting video, or taking pictures, or relaxing in his new condo, then he's probably out giving presentations. "In the past month I did a talk at RubyConf India about MacRuby. I also did a talk at the MobileX Conference in Nashville on Building Native Apps with Titanium and gave the closing keynote. I'll be going to the MobileX Conference in Lexington this week and will be doing the same Titanium talk, an Introduction to Palm webOS talk, and the closing keynote again."

Of course, Brendan loves his mobile devices just about as much as he loves developing for them. I had to ask him what his favorite apps were for the iPhone and his new iPad. His list of favorites goes on endlessly, but he especially loves Keynote, "because I can work on my presentations from the iPad and actually show off my presentations on it. I actually had to do a whole talk using my iPad today at the Atlanta Mobile Devs Meetup because I couldn't find the projector!" He also really likes the Epicurious app, which aids him in his effort to cook more at home. The Eyewitness app is another one of his favorites, along with Netflix, Air Video, and Things.

Brendan recently purchased his first piece of real estate, a condo in the middle of Atlanta, which he shares with Edel. He set down roots in Georgia to be close to his family in Alabama. Although he has spent most of his life living in Alabama and Georgia, he did spend some time living in Indonesia and Hawaii as a young child.

Brendan is young but has already come across great professional success. He gets to wake up everyday in the city that he loves, and walk over to his desk in his loft to start work for the day. His ingenuity, raw talent and work ethic have brought him to where he is today: from a gamer hiding his geekery from his high school wrestling friends, to an accomplished Director of Mobile Development with Intridea. And we're lucky that Brendan loves us as much as we love him: "I love it at Intridea. I love the people I work with. It's like a family here."

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

This week on the Intridea Insider, meet Brent Collier, Senior Engineer at Intridea and unofficial Apple spokesperson.

Brent's Mom always worked in IT, so he had the advantage of being raised around computers from an early age. He grew up playing video games like RC ProAM and Gran Turismo. But his engineering skills were first born and cultivated through building with Legos, long before he ever touched a computer or gaming console. Like many software engineers he had a curiosity for understanding the mechanics of how things worked from a very young age. "I've always been into building and taking things apart. I like to know how stuff works."

Although Brent later enjoyed tinkering with hardware as a teenager, he entered VCU in Richmond, VA with the intention of studying art. "I did lots of drawing and a little sculpture as a kid but I quickly realized that there was no money in art and then moved to Mechanical Engineering." Mechanical Engineering was a natural choice for Brent since it coincided with his interest in building and fixing things. Eventually his passion for software development surfaced and he switched to Computer Science. He explains that although he had fun working with computer hardware, "I didn't really get into software as much until I was in college. I just didn't realize how much information about it was so readily available until then."

Armed with a CS degree from VCU, he went out into the world and claimed a Java job with a consulting company in Richmond. He wasn't in love with the client-focused world of consulting, so when a friend nudged him to interview with Kajeet, a mobile start-up in Bethesda, he jumped on the opportunity.

At Kajeet, Brent met Brendan Lim (Check back next week for an Insider post on Brendan). "We quickly became really good friends, and we used to sit around thinking up start-up ideas. Twitter was just starting to pick up in 2007 and it always annoyed me that you couldn't seamlessly upload pictures, so we ran with the idea and created Yappd. That was the application that got me started with Ruby and Ruby on Rails." So Brent and Brendan poured their energy and free time into building Yappd, a Twitter clone with pictures.

Yappd had incredible potential and quickly got press from sources like TechCrunch, Mashable and PCMagazine.com. Brent was thrilled about the possibilities for Yappd, but it was quickly acquired by his employer.

Brent started at Intridea with Brendan several months after Yappd was acquired. He was hooked on Ruby and didn't want to continue working in Java. He says that, "Java just felt crusty and gross" after working with Rails.

Since starting at Intridea, Brent and his wife Amy (whom he met while bartending at Bennigan's) moved from his home state in Virginia to the Raleigh/Durham area in North Carolina. They wanted to raise their two boys, Cameron and Dillan, in a safe and family-oriented location. He enjoys the lack of traffic congestion in Raleigh/Durham compared to the DC/MD/VA areas, along with the lower cost of living and the nicer people.

In the last year at Intridea Brent has worked on a multitude of projects, but his favorite was Earthaid, a home utilities monitoring service. "They monitor your usage and suggest ways to lower your energy consumption. It was a quick, somewhat small project, and we had a dedicated, full-time designer which makes any project better!"

When Brent isn't working on a development project or playing with his kids, or being a ninja with Brendan, he tinkers a bit with Obj-C and mobile development. He has done a little work on some Titanium projects and is looking forward to more. He proudly admits to having a love affair with Apple (which coincidentally began around the same time he switched from Java to Ruby), and wants to develop apps for Apple devices like the iPad.

I asked Brent if he has a favorite Mac app, and although he insisted that he loves all Mac apps, I did get him to suggest CloudApp: "One of my most recent favorites is called CloudApp; you just choose a file and drag it to the menubar then you get a link automatically copied to your clipboard. It's super useful and I probably use it ten times a day!" He advocates that CloudApp is much quicker than Skitch if you don't need to annotate.

Like many of Intridea's engineers, Brent gets to work from home. He prefers to work at his kitchen table with the house windows wide open and sunlight pouring in. He codes to trance or garage rock for inspiration and attributes AWDWR and The Pragmatic Programmer as the books that motivated him to be a great programmer. He is another example of how a childhood filled with Legos, video games and nurtured curiosity can result in future adult awesomeness.

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

We are very excited to announce the “Intridea Insider”, a new blog series that will profile a new Intridean every week. Check in every Thursday morning to get a detailed interview with a team member, and discover everything from their favorite gems and productivity apps to their favorite coffee spots and blogs. 

This week’s featured Intridean is Joe Grossberg: 

Like many geeks, Joe grew up liking dinosaurs and computers. It wasn’t until he met the web in 1994 though, that he had a real reason to favor one over the other. His love affair with the web started with a very simple menu option: View > Source. Being able to not only visit a website, but also see how it was put together and then tinker with it was a powerful opportunity. For Joe, this plus the combination of HTML being pretty simple to learn meant that, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could ...” was replaced by “Look at all the cool stuff I can do ...”

Unlike many formally educated CS students who find themselves in software development positions, Joe took a roundabout path to his Senior Engineering position at Intridea. Joe was interested in programming since dabbling in LOGO and BASIC as a kid, but he studied Anthropology and Journalism in college, and after graduation he worked at an Advertising & PR firm. His software engineering future was instantiated in 1999 when he was able to transition to the New Media department at the firm to build websites. From there, Joe encountered endless opportunities to learn and use other technologies like CSS, JS, ColdFusion, Perl, PHP, ASP, JSP, Python, and of course, Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Before joining the Intridea team, Joe was working on one of the largest Rails applications to date, at Revolution Health in DC. 

When asked if he ever feels he is at a disadvantage to formally educated web development professionals, he answers, “Well it's a question I've been asked before, and I say no, for two reasons:

• I work with high-level languages and almost never find myself saying, ‘I wish I could do this in C’.

• In my 11 years of experience, I’ve seen very little correlation between the education level and quality of a coder.

Being self-taught requires motivation, discipline and a love of learning and Joe certainly has all three. He reads all the time and has used bloggers as “substitute mentors” throughout the years. He looked to blogs like Joel on Software, “when it was still good” he says. “They gave me insight into what much more experienced and practiced developers were doing.” Nowadays he enjoys reading blogs like A Fresh Cup, because it gives him quick access to good information: “Mike Gunderloy does such a great job of tracking down and compiling links to cool stuff out there, saving me the trouble of doing so.” 

As far as development tools are concerned, Joe is an emacs user through and through. Being able to learn all the emacs tricks from a senior developer he used to work with prompted him to adopt this as his editor of choice early on. “I’m old school,” Joe admits after explaining why he stuck with emacs even while many of his peers were swooning over TextMate. “Any editor being proprietary and tied to a single OS was a non-starter for me. And I figure emacs was here before I started programming; it'll be here after I retire.” 

Joe spends a lot of time in script/console and cites the under-appreciated Wirble as a favorite gem. His .irbrc, along with other configuration files, are available on github. “One thing I like about hacking is the ability to customize the environment to meet my own needs.”

When I asked Joe what he loves most about Ruby, he began talking about the Ruby “ecosystem.” We talked about the passion for quality code that so many Rubyists seem to share and how that creates a unique ecosystem. “Ruby seems to have a greatly disproportionate number of people who really do 'give a shit'; their opinions can and do clash, but they have them and they care about them.” Joe identifies “The Pragmatic Programmer” as the book that inspired him to approach writing software as a craft. He says it gave him the realization “that it’s worth being great at software development, that things like quality matter, and that it’s worth investing in learning.” 

Joe cites the DCRUG, an event he helps to organize, as an example of how diverse and remarkable the Ruby community is; “People come from everywhere to do presentations. They care so much about what they’re working on that they will travel to another city just to share it with other geeks.” 

While Joe Grossberg sounds a lot like the quintessential Rubyist, there are some things you might be surprised to know. For example, Joe is not a testing fanatic. While he sees lots of value in testing, especially on large-scale projects with a multitude of developers, he says it’s all about the end-user. “Let’s be honest; it’s not like software was all broken and unusable before the testing/TDD/BDD meme became big.” He reasons that while testing “increases quality in multiple ways, the difference between 99% test coverage and 100% coverage is probably not what’s going to make-or-break your application.” He believes that tests are most valuable, however, when you’re working on someone else’s code; tests provide a safety net and “make legacy code less dastardly.” 

Another interesting trait that distinguishes Joe from most programmers is that he is not a caffeine junkie! Instead of reaching for coffee when he gets tired and hits a lull he changes focus by going to the gym, reading blogs, or opening a book. In fact, the gym has played a big part in changing Joe’s life in the last couple of years. He has shed almost 90 lbs by diligently working out, cooking healthy meals at home (his site is the #1 result in Google if you search “how to make curry”) and getting fitness advice from sources like his favorite fitness blog, Mark’s Daily Apple.

Most Intrideans work from their home offices and are spread out across the country. But Joe lives in DC and actually prefers to work in our office. He likes having the ergonomic chair and a real desk setup with wireless keyboard and mouse, without the distractions of a coffee shop and the clean separation between work and home. He enjoys a casual, five block walk to the Intridea office; as he walks by the gridlocked traffic each day, he is reminded of how grateful he is that he’s been able to “opt out of that life.” Joe wants to work in the office, so he does. “But I also realize that’s not for everybody”, he explains. “To me, that’s one of the best parts of working at Intridea -- the flexibility. None of this 'one size fits all' nonsense like ‘everybody pair programs all the time’.”

Joe is an insanely talented developer as a result of his determination and love of learning. At Intridea, we are pretty happy that he chose computers over dinosaurs.

When Joe is not working at the Intridea office in DC, he spends time with his wife, Salem, whom he speaks of with the highest regard. “She’s my favorite person in the history of the world. She’s brilliantly smart and she loves learning.” Joe and Salem met on the internet and were the JDate Success Story of the month recently. They also have two adorable cats, Miju and Peeps.