They've been with us over a month already, so I offer this belated announcement of our latest hires who filled previously announced job openings. (We are still hiring.)

Valerie Gerry, Designer

With a BA, Cum Laude, in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College, and previous work as a graphic designer for the University of Colorado at Boulder, Valerie brings to the team that rare combination of a science background and artistic sensibility, with interests in working towards an understanding of behavior, design, art and movement. At the Dartmouth Center for Cognitive Neuroscience as well as at Yale University, she did computer programming and database management. She's also co-authored scientific research in the field, based on data she helped capture and analyze. When she's not in the office, she's working towards her MFA at CU Boulder.

Valerie has already done wonderful design work for some of our client sites, which will be going live in coming weeks. We couldn't be more thrilled having her join the pingVision family.

Ezra Barnett Gildesgame

Ezra joined us ostensibly as an intern, but he's already doing development work and is writing an in-depth tutorial on working with phpTemplate, so we've dropped the "intern" label from his title. He is a self taught computer user skilled in Drupal, video, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, HTML and RSS. He has worked for Amusement Consultants, the New Roc Funhouse megaplex entertainment center and the Knitting Factory music venue in New York City as a computer consultant (intern), website maintainer and music reviewer. Moving beyond the traditional isolation computer science education "enjoys" in our school system, Ezra collaborated with his high school History professors to create an easy-to-use archival system for scanned images from a diverse library of print media using a web-server.

Both Valerie and Ezra have come to us outside of the normal mainstreamed paths towards interactive media and web development -- and we consider that a strength in them both, as open source web development is still very much a new frontier where fresh perspectives and new ideas are essential. I think we, and I hope the greater Drupal community, will benefit from their insights and contributions.

Mum's the word

We've also hired another developer, who for the time being shall remain our secret weapon, as he has other obligations that would make a public announcement, um, awkward for him. He's a respected core Drupal developer, and has proven to us many times over why he has the high reputation he enjoys within the Drupal community. Hopefully someday soon we can let the developer cat out of the bag, but for now we're just delighted to have his talent and expertise on the team.