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.
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.
]]>
Kevin Bridges joined us a few weeks ago as developer, sysadmin and Ajax wiz after attending a Denver/Boulder Drupal User Group meetup in Denver. Known to Drupallers as cyberswat, Kevin maintains the Picasa and Auto Assign Role modules. Already he's written for client projects a couple of complex custom modules (which we hope to contribute to the Drupal project soon), spruced up another project with some nifty Ajax, and brought new energy and ideas to our project management development quest. 
More recently, Andy Lasda joined us as a developer and programmer. Andy's interest in computers began at the tender age of 9, programming BASIC on an Apple II, and his love for technology has only grown. Now with over a dozen years' professional experience in systems administration, web development and application development in PHP and Perl -- not to mention business analysis and project management -- Andy is joining the Drupal community. Watch for interesting things by alasda in the months to come!
