The InfoEther Team

Management

Rich Kilmer

President & Chief Executive Officer (Co-Founder)

Rich co-founded InfoEther as a for-profit company to focus on applying Ruby in business. He also co-founded Ruby Central, Inc., a non-profit promoting Ruby, where he is an active board member today and a leading contributor in the Ruby open-source community. Prior to InfoEther, Rich founded and served as CTO of Roku Technologies, one of the first peer-to-peer solutions companies and an early adopter of Java. In his 20 years as a software technologist, he has been a sales engineer, designer, consultant and a systems security manager in the U.S. Air Force at the Pentagon. He is an internationally known speaker at software technology conferences.

Mark Gardner

Chief Operating Officer (Co-Founder)

A serial entrepreneur and consultant, Mark is the original co-founder of the company with Rich. With over 30 years of small and big company operational, sales and marketing experience, Mark heads up the business development, administrative and operational side of the company. He is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and former Marine Officer.

Chad Fowler

Chief Technology Officer

Chad Fowler is an internationally known software developer, trainer, manager, speaker, and musician. Over the past decade he has worked with some of the world's largest companies and most admired software developers. He loves to program computers and, as part of his role as CTO of InfoEther, Inc., spends much of his time solving hard problems for customers in the Ruby language. He is co-organizer of RubyConf and RailsConf and author or co-author of a number of popular software books, including "The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development" and the upcoming "Rails 3 Recipes".

Glenn Vanderburg

Chief Scientist

Glenn Vanderburg is well-known in the Ruby, Rails and Enterprise software communities and has been a speaker at a wide variety of industry conferences over the last 10 years. He is an expert on technologies and methodologies ranging from Java and XML to Ruby, Rails, agile methods and functional programming. He is particularly well-known for his JavaScript expertise, a technology that has become increasingly important. During his 25 years of experience in consulting and software development, he has done work for major corporations and start-ups alike. In his role as Chief Scientist he is responsible for insuring our consulting practice is always at the top of its game, and to lead several of our major client projects. Glenn received his Computer Science degree from Texas A&M.

Technology & Consulting Team

David Craine

Dave is a founding member of the company's core software development team bringing 20+ years of software and technology deployment experience to the table. He has been the lead developer and software architect for three companies and is an expert in cross-platform development. Dave is particularly expert at systems level and database design and implementation. He holds a Masters degree from the Air Force Institute of Technology and is a former Air Force officer.

Tom Copeland

Tom was also a founding member of the company's core software development team and is a known open-source technologist and author. He was selected as Oracle Magazine's first “Open-Source Developer of the Year” for his creation of the Java code testing software PMD, a project that was also listed as one of the Top 27 Open-Source applications in the world by Software Development Magazine. He has written Generating Parsers with JavaCC and PMD Applied and is a leading Rails developer. Tom is a U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduate and former Coast Guard officer.

Ryan Owens

Ryan has focused much of his career on software development on complex user interface design and implementation. He has specific expertise in Ruby and Rails interfaces, CSS, HTML and AJAX. He also has a strong background in developing advanced ActionScript-based Adobe Flash interfaces in addition to Java and J2EE systems. Ryan has held positions in game design at several companies.

John Athayde

John brings years of usability, user experience and visual design expertise to the InfoEther team. Prior to InfoEther, he ran the DC based UI/UX shop "Hyphenated People" with Amy Hoy. He also ran a 15 person creative team at a large e-commerce shop for two years. When he's not emotionally attached to a website, he can be found performing in his band, Juniper Lane, or working on 3d animation and electronic music. He holds a Masters degree in Architecture (the building variety, not the information kind) from Catholic University of America.

Bruce Williams

Bruce is a full-stack generalist with experience in everything from low-level data processing backends to frontend user interaction, and is a frequent speaker, trainer, and book contributor. While an expert Rubyist, he loves to backpack through the wilds of other languages and paradigms. Before InfoEther Bruce held key software development positions in a number of cutting-edge Ruby startups, and in a former life was a U.S. Air Force linguist and intelligence analyst.

Bill Davenport

Bill has been following technology and innovation since he was young enough to program on an Atari 800. Ruby and Rails became his forte after discovering Ruby solutions as an IT manager and application programmer. Bill took his Ruby skills to the next level by working for two start-up companies with an Agile development model. He has also spent time as a Product Manager and understands the complexities of the entire software development cycle.

Anthony Burns

Anthony Burns is a passionate Rails developer and automation connoisseur. He lives an alter ego once a month in the National Guard, where he first discovered Ruby and Rails while deployed to Iraq. Dedicated to producing clean, quality applications and automating their deployment, he has worked with numerous clients to get their applications to production systematically and effectively. Anthony is also the coauthor of the upcoming Pragmatic Bookshelf release, Deploying Rails.

Sara J. Flemming

Front-end (User Experience/User Interface) development has been Sara's domain for a decade. Problem solving and producing clean code are two of her favorite things and neither massive sites nor vocal users are enough to scare her off. Sara is based out of Seattle and when she's not dodging rain puddles, you can probably find her at the library or out expanding on her photography skills.

International Consulting Base

We can draw upon a large body of external consultants and organizations that we have worked with on past projects. Specific capabilities include Software Architecture, Ruby and Rails, Adobe Flash, Interaction Design, VoIP, Graphics Design and Market Strategy. InfoEther performs on projects worldwide.

Michael Koziarski

Michael "Koz" Koziarski is one of our best known software consultant subcontractors. He is a legend in the Ruby/Rails community where he has been a contributor to Rails since 2004, and a Rails Core Team member since 2005. He helps other programmers improve their code on The Rails Way, a popular Rails architecture weblog. Koz is a frequent speaker at worldwide Rails conferences. He is based in New Zealand and works on select projects for us worldwide.

Koz photo by James Duncan Davidson

Keavy McMinn

Keavy originally trained as a fine artist at The Glasgow School of Art, specializing in sculpture. In 2001, she started her own web consultancy, Minimetre and has enjoyed pairing up with development shops around the world. She is an advocate for Test Driven Development and works to solve people problems with clean code. She has specialized in Ruby development since 2006, and is enjoying venturing into speaking and training. In her spare time, she trains for Ironman distance triathlons.

Fernand Galiana

Fernand is the owner of a consultancy based in Denver Colorado. He has extensive experience in team management and development in all aspects of the software stack. He is an open source contributor, talks at various Ruby and Rails related conferences and host the Denver rails user group. In his copious spare time, he studies Chinese martial arts and restores his cabin nested in the rockies.

Anthony Eden

Anthony has been developing software for the web since 1995. Beginning with Perl and then Java, he has developed a wide variety of web sites and web applications for content publishing, domain registration, data warehousing and the mobile web. In 2005 Anthony began using Ruby and Rails and quickly made the switch from Java to using Ruby for the majority of his work. He is a creator of numerous open source projects, including ActiveWarehouse and Rails SQL Views and a contributor for many others. Anthony has spoken at numerous Ruby and Rails-related conferences and is a strong advocate for craftsmanship in software development.

Alan Francis

Alan's an Extreme Programmer and has been developing, teaching and consulting in a variety of languages for 15 years. He spent a lot of time with C++ and Java, but these days mostly works with Objective C and Ruby. Alan has contributed to RubyGems and Rails and co-organizes the wildly successful Scottish Ruby Conference, now in it's 4th year.

Marty Haught

Marty is a software engineer and entrepreneur in Colorado where he founded Haught Codeworks, a Ruby-focused consultancy that specializes in a lean approach to software. Beyond helping startups, he is active in the software community by running the Boulder Ruby Group as well as organizing the mountain.rb regional Ruby conference in Boulder. Marty somehow finds time to raise his two active children with his beautiful wife and enjoy the great outdoors of Colorado.

Team photos by Douglas Sonders Photography