Author biographies

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  • Benjamin Melançon, photographed by Kathleen Murtagh (2011)

    Benjamin Melançon

    Benjamin builds web sites to give people a little more power over their online presence.  He strives to build ways to connect people for planning and coordination that will help us all gain a lot more power in the rest of our lives.

  • Jacine Luisi

    Jacine Luisi

    Jacine is a front-end developer, specializing in Drupal theme development. She's been working on websites since 2004, and primarily with Drupal since 2007. She's currently leading the HTML5 Initiative with a fantastic team of developers to update Drupal 8 to use modern markup and CSS techniques. She also co-maintains the Markup and CSS components for Drupal core, and has contributed to a number of themes and modules. She currently resides in Rye Brook, NY with her husband Jack, and Westie Bailey.

  • Károly Négyesi

    Károly spent the 1990s as a columnist and editor of Hungary's then-largest computing monthly, Chip Magazine. After that, he turned to web programming. His life and Drupal got hopelessly entangled in 2004. Since then he has risen to be one of the most prolific core contributors and had a brief stint as the first leader of the security team. These days he is the senior software architect for Examiner.com, one of the biggest Drupal-based websites. He is very intrigued about cognitive sciences and considers Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game as the Book.

  • Michelle Lauer

    Michelle Lauer (aka miche on Drupal.org) started her Drupal adventures in 2006 and quickly became known for her incredible sense of detail while possessing the ability to see the big picture. These innate skills allowed Michelle to cultivate her specialty of site architecture and multi-phased deployments.

    In addition to custom module development and theming, she develops and implements the strategy for complex content architecture from the end-user experience to the manageability by website administrators.

    Michelle's resume includes presentations at DrupalCon Paris and DrupalCon San Francisco, DrupalCamp Montreal and coordinator and curriculum author for DrupalCamp NH Training Day. Her dedication to the Drupal community awarded her a scholarship to DrupalCon Copenhagen.

    In addition to her public appearances, Michelle recently contracted for national brand and was the sole person responsible for architecting and building a site with a focus on the content administrator experience.

    When Michelle isn't fulfilling her passion as a Drupal trainer and community advocate for Lullabot, she can be found playing soccer or urban-hiking. Michelle resides outside of Boston with her family and home full of pets.

  • Greg Anderson

    Greg Anderson is one of the co-maintainers of drush, the Drupal shell. He runs the Developer Technical Support Group in the Americas for Ricoh Corporation.

    Greg uses Drupal in both his work and in his personal life. He did the Drupal conversion of the website for The Great Dickens Fair, where he an other performers bring the spirit of Christmas to life. He is assisting with another large migration of many websites for The Society for Creative Anachronism, a historic recreation society where he and his wife run the children's program. He is also working with a community local school district support group, and writes an environmental blog with his wife.

  • Bojhan Somers

    Interaction designer living and working in Amsterdam. Passionate about designing complex (web) applications and physical things. Studying Interaction Design at Utrecht school of Arts

    • Active as UX-Team Lead in the Drupal community
    • Regularly speaks about opensource, information architecture and design on conferences

    Has been involved with the Drupal community, helping form the UX team and taking a leading role in bringing user experience changes to the core software. Enjoys the challenges of designing in an open source environment.

  • Ryan Szrama at Do It With Drupal 2008

    Ryan Szrama

    Ryan got his start in web development through an online sales company based in Louisville, KY, his home of over 10 years. It was there that he nursed Ubercart through its infancy to its use on over 20,000 websites as the Project Lead and community face of the project.

    Ryan joined Commerce Guys in 2009 and continued to lead Ubercart until switching gears into Drupal Commerce, a new initiative that empowers users to build e-commerce sites with the best new features Drupal 7 has to offer. He focuses most of his time developing the code base, growing the community of contributors to the project, and training new users online and at community events.

  • Dani Nordin

    Dani Nordin is a user experience designer who switched from Wordpress to Drupal in 2008. Since then, she’s been active as a voice in the Design for Drupal community and has spent entirely too much time looking for ways to make design for Drupal more efficient and effective. She speaks regularly at Boston Drupal events, including Boston’s Design for Drupal Camp. Dani is currently writing The Designer’s Guide to Drupal for O'Reilly, to be released in 2011.

  • Susan Stewart

    Susan Stewart is an 8-year Drupal veteral with a passion for community engineering. As Drupal's Support Team lead and president of Drupal Indy Group, Susan is always looking for new ways to grow the community and turn passive consumers into active contributors. She works as a Drupal consultant in Indianapolis, Indiana.

  • Florian Lorétan

    Florian started working with Drupal in 2005, a passion which turned into a full-time job two years later. As a Drupal developer, he has worked on many large social networking projects and has provided consulting services to many well-established web development agencies. His contributions include modules and themes as well as many core patches.

    Originally from Switzerland, Florian has also been an active member in many communities worldwide. He was a core organizer for the first Drupal Dev Days, a track chair for DrupalCon Copenhagen and he has participated in the organisation of many other events. He has given presentations at DrupalCons, DrupalCamps and various local communities from Geneva to San Diego.

    Florian is a co-founder of Wunderkraut, a company providing Drupal coaching and consulting services for the European market. He occasionally writes on his personal blog at Happy Pixels

  • Ed Carlevale

    Ed Carlevale

    Ed Carlevale is a long-time web developer at MIT, working in the area of energy and sustainability (http://mitenergyclub.org, http://sustainability.mit.edu, http://mit.edu/canes). As the founder of the nascent MIT Drupal Group, he has hosted many Drupal events at MIT, including Dries Buytaert's "State of Drupal" (MIT World, 2009), Boston Design4Drupal Camp 2009 and 2010, as well as the monthly meetings of the Boston Drupal Group, led by Moshe Weitzman.

  • Stefan Freudenberg's picture

    Stefan Freudenberg

    Stefan is a backend developer with some experience in linux system administration. Drawn into developing websites with Drupal and into the community in late 2008 he has spent most of his commercial and volunteer activity on it. His debugging and profiling skills make him popular with his teams while arguing for simpler architecture and standards compliance is what he enjoys most but is not always as well received.

  • Stéphane Corlosquet

    Stéphane holds a master's degree specializing in Semantic Web from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Ireland. He currently works at the Mass General Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease (MIND), MGH, as a Software Engineer to work on the Science Collaboration Framework, a Drupal-based distribution to build online communities of researchers in biomedecine.

    Stéphane has contributed to Drupal 6 and is one of the top 30 contributors to Drupal 7 core. He maintains the RDF module in Drupal 7, and is a member of the Drupal Security Team. Since joining the community in 2005, he has been a speaker at many DrupalCons and DrupalCamps, mostly on the topic of RDF and Drupal. He co-authored the ISWC 2009 "Best Semantic Web In Use Paper" titled Produce and Consume Linked Data with Drupal!.

    Stéphane lives in the Boston area with his beloved wife Diliny, new-born son Kiran, and hyper-active dog Maya.

  • Robin Monks

  • Greg Stout

    Greg Stout

    Greg Stout is Director of Technology at GlobalPost. Each month GlobalPost serves breaking and in-depth global international news to more than 6 millions readers from its Drupal site.

    A trained expert in user interface design and development, Mr. Stout has 16 years experience in web application development, web site development, product and project management, feature planning, specification, design, creation and usability testing. He has worked on a number of high-profile commercial web sites including Sovereign Bank and Kinko’s Print on demand B2B service.

    Recently, Mr. Stout was part of the User Interface Development team at Ektron Inc., which produces the popular .NET scalable web authoring and content management solution CMS400.NET. He holds a BA in Computer Graphics & Visual Effects from the Roy H. Park School of Communications Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY.

  • Kasey Qynn Dolin

    Kasey Qynn Dolin is an anthropologist with experience studying (and organizing) the growth and survival of communities and not-for-profit projects.

    She received a BS in Anthropology, with minors in Latin American Studies (focus on Brasil) and International Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University.

    Her previously published work includes Candombléwords, Sounds, and Power in Jamaican Rastafari and Yorùbán Religious Survival in Brazilian Candomblé.

  • Peter Wolanin

    Peter M. Wolanin, Ph.D.

    Peter's involvement with Drupal dates to late 2005 when a friend who had been a Howard Dean supporter involved him in a project to build a new web presence for the local Democratic party club, and they started building the site on Drupal 4.7 beta. Peter soon became as much interested in the challenge of fixing bugs and adding features in Drupal core and contributed modules as actual site building, and became a noted contributor to Drupal 5, 6 and 7, a member of the Drupal documentation team, joined the Drupal Security Team, and was elected in 2010 as a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association.

    Peter joined the Acquia engineering team in 2008, and enjoys the company of his stellar colleagues. Before all this, Peter graduated cum laude from Princeton University, received a doctoral degree in Physics from the University of Michigan, and conducted post-doctoral and industrial research in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.

  • Allie Micka

    Allie has been an open source developer and advocate since 2001. She has worked on several open source applications, including 3 years of extensive development and participation in the Drupal project. Through her hosting and services work, she has provided active sponsorship and education in local communities, and now works on education, infrastructure and open source development at Advantage Labs. Prior to this, Allie was the the team manager of web development for a major online brokerage, which taught her to apply enterprise business strategies to sustainable community participation.

  • Kay VanValkenburgh of OwnSourcing, Drupal Training

    Kay VanValkenburgh

    Kay VanValkenburgh is a Boston-based Drupal project director with a strong focus on training and mentorship. His latest venture is OwnSourcing, started in 2010 to develop hands-on training and project-specific documentation that help non-developers do great things with Drupal. Under the same aegis, Kay founded a mentorship program to help budding Drupal developers get their start (see ownsourcing.com/mentorship). Kay geeks out on usable software, how people learn, world languages, and competitive sailing.

  • Claudina Sarahe

    Claudina Sarahe began her career as a front-end developer for both Pop Art and The New Group in Portland, Oregon. In 2007, she left the west coast and set up shop in New York, where she began work at the Huffington Post. She then went on to become one of the founding members of UNICEF Innovation. It was at UNICEF where her interest in open-source technology strategies developed. She further pursued this at Method, leading interactive development for clients such as Charlie Rose, PBS, Scholastic and Count Me In. She lead the strategy and initial product development for Vestify, a crowdfunding web application for entrepreneurs powering the MassChallenge Global Start-Up Competition.

    Claudina Sarahe believes in philosophy and principles of open-source and see's great value for society outside open-source technological communities to learn from the models of governance and advancement. For the last three years and counting she has been working with Drupal and loves the code but above all, the community.

    Claudina Sarahe still loves front-end development and is excited about the HTML 5 initiatives and overall rise in concern within the Drupal community around front-end issues, including usability and accessibility. She now has turned a lot of her focus to bettering collaboration between clients and technologists- leveraging open source tools to fulfill organizational needs in a streamlined, efficient manner and Drupal education in middle to high school students with a focus on less advantaged (bi-lingual) communities. Claudina Sarahe is currently a Principal at Agaric.

    A firm believer in a balanced, interdisciplinary lifestyle she co-hosts a weekly radio show—My Family Album—as part of the Radio Hive Freeform Radio Collective. She invites readers to tune in live every Tuesday from 8-10 PM EST, or peruse the archives. When she has time she volunteers at Bluestockings and the 4th Street Food Coop. She keeps her mind and body elastic with lots of Bikram Yoga and Crossfit.

  • Dan Hakimzadeh

    An original co-founder of Agaric, Dan spends his time and energy building on this mystical phenomenon popularly called the Internet. He believes in the principles of free open source software and develops primarily using the Drupal content management framework.

  • Forest Mars

    Forest Mars is a hypermedia architect who has been using Drupal since 2005, mainly in the space of media and business integration, and is extremely active in the Drupal Community. As a member of the Drupalcon Paris 2009 team he built the infamous "Druplicon Road Trip" site. Some of his recent projects include architecting a video delivery platform for the world's largest television network and New York City's first civic engagement platform. In whatever time he has left over he gives talks on the Drupal API such as "Bongo for Mongo" and "The Horrible Truth about Drupal." He lives at home in New York without his 2 cats.

  • Mike Ryan

    Mike has given much to the Drupal community since first contributing in 2003. He's behind the Migrate and Table Wizard modules, and specializes in migrating data to Drupal as part of Cyrve. He was also the original author of the Pathauto module, the extremely popular Drupal module for automatically creating friendly URLs for pages and thus greatly improving SEO.

  • Sam Boyer

    Sam Boyer

    Sam Boyer led the Drupal project's migration from CVS to Git, and continues to lead the efforts of the Drupal.org Git Team to expand Git-related features on Drupal.org. To that end, he is also a member of the d.o infrastructure team.

    Sam's core contributions were light prior to D8, but he now devotes a fair bit of effort to a scattering of Drupal's lower-level, critical path systems. In contrib, he co-maintain Panels and CTools with merlinofchaos, and leads maintainership of the Version Control API suite of modules.

  • George Cassie

    George Cassie is a builder of Drupal-powered web sites, web applications, and intranets. He specializes in data and process analysis, data cleaning and transformation, and migrating data.

    He is presently a client advisor at Acquia.

  • Nathaniel Catchpole

    Nathaniel Catchpole has been using Drupal since version 4.5, and has been a regular contributor to Drupal core since 2006. He contributed over 400 patches to the Drupal 7 release alongside extensive code profiling, and maintains the entity cache and performance hacks contributed modules.

  • Dmitri Gaskin

    15 year old Drupaller, award-winning composer/Steve Reich fan, and gardener/animal caretaker. And 10th grader.

  • Roy Scholten

    Roy Scholten is an interaction designer and has a small design studio, yoroy. He lives in the Netherlands speaks Dutch, English, and German. He is the UX maintainer for Drupal 7.

    Before Drupal 7 reached beta, Roy made a Drupal 7 site using only core functionality, with a custom theme that is CSS only. It's in dutch. http://www.gaghilversum.nl/

  • Albert Albala

    After completing a university undergraduate degree combining linguistics and computer science, Albert started dabbling in Drupal in 2006 (After 2 years with Joomla) and co-founded Mediatribe.net, a partnership offering Drupal consulting services. In 2009 he dropped Mediatribe.net to join Koumbit, a Drupal-oriented not-for-profit collective in Montreal. Being part of a larger team has allowed him to concentrate on Simpletest and Features, two areas that are reinforcing the quality of Drupal sites as the platform matures. Albert's other activities include small-scale international development projects through Terre des jeunes.

  • Amye Scavarda

    Amye Scavarda is a project manager. She's been involved with Drupal since October 2008, and in that time has realized how much there is to learn. She runs Function, a consulting company focusing on open source, and organizes community events in her spare time. She lives in Portland, OR and you'll find her online as @msamye on twitter, and amye in IRC.

  • Jake Strawn

    Jake Strawn

    Jake has been working with the web since 1998, and started with a brief background in HTML/CSS, moving into PHP/MySQL and web application programming. After almost 8 years of PHP/MySQL programming, he discovered Drupal, and his life was changed forever, making complex tasks simple with a framework built for extensibility and efficiency. Jake has extensive experience with the Drupal framework with over 1600 commits to his name (http://drupal.org/user/159141). He has been a speaker at many Drupal events including DrupalCons and DrupalCamps.

    Jake works almost exclusively with Drupal 7 now, and has invested hundreds of hours into learning and expanding on the new Drupal 7 APIs, including upgrading his 960 grid system based Omega base theme (http://drupal.org/project/omega), which promises to be one of the most powerful base themes in Drupal 7.

    Jake also recently relaunched his blog (http://himerus.com) on Drupal 7.

  • Moshe Weitzman

    Moshe Weitzman

    Moshe Weitzman has been a consistent contributor to Drupal core and Contrib since November 2001 (i.e. before drupal.org was born). As such, he has pretty much touched the whole core code. He maintains the user.module, the bootstrap code, and the groups.drupal.org web site. He is the #1 Drupal developer on Ohloh. He is also a member of the Security team and a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association.

    Services: Consulting services include site planning, information architecture (i.e. wireframes), installation, training, and ongoing support. Custom Drupal software development is my specialty. Depending on the size of your project, I may hire subcontractors (with your permission) to implement parts of the site. My minimum fee for a project is US$15,000.

    Cyrve. I started a company, Cyrve, which specializes in data migration into Drupal. We do migrations for a living, so why should you struggle through yours? Hire us and enjoy a pain free data migration. Your developers will thank you.

    Moshe is intimate with Drupal's inner workings, and can complete custom projects with speed and quality. He is maintainer of the following Drupal areas:

    devel module. The sine qua non for drupal developers.
    organic groups
    diff
    distributed authentication
    block page visiblity
    e-mail handling
    glossary module
    syndication module
    token authentication
    web server authentication integration
    significant system documentation

  • Robert Douglass

    Robert has worked with Drupal, full-time, since 2004. He wrote the first book that was published about Drupal ("Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and Wordpress"), and has been the technical editor of all three editions of "Pro Drupal Development". Through teaching and personal influences he has helped hundreds of people transition into careers as Drupal developers and service providers. In 2005 he led Drupal's involvement in the first Google Summer of Code program, and has been active as a leader and mentor ever since.

    Robert has been a member of the Drupal Association General Assembly since 2006, and has actively participated in many Association activities, including the organization of DrupalCons and DrupalCamps. In 2008 he co-founded the Drupal-Initiative, Germany's non-profit for the promotion of Drupal. After 2-year tenure as the Vice President of that organization, he helped coordinate the election of a new Board and handed over control in 2010.

    In 2007 Robert founded and built GoPHP5.org - an initiative to bring open source PHP projects and Webhosts together in order to speed the upgrade to PHP5. One result of this is that Drupal 7 relinquished PHP4 compatibility, allowing the core team to do things like add the PDO database drivers. Over 100 software projects and over 200 web hosts joined the movement and quite a bit was written in the press.

    Robert's largest code contributions to Drupal have come in the form of the Apache Solr module and the Memcache module, both of which were started in 2007, and which he still maintains today.

    Robert currently serves on the advisory boards of Commerce Guys and ICanLocalize, where he helps with business, product, and marketing decisions.

    Skills

    Robert is strong in Drupal site architecture, module development, coding best practices, performance and scalability. He is good at listening to the needs and concerns of various stakeholders in a project and developing solutions that accommodate diverse and even competing interests. He can also act as a communication facilitator between technical and non-technical audiences.

    Employment history

    Before joining Acquia as Senior Advisor, Robert worked for Lullabot (2006-2008).

  • Brian Travis

    Brian Travis has been disassembling technology since shortly after birth. Before computers came along, he was content to turn his attention to household appliances. An advocate of the "learn by making mistakes" school, Brian is never afraid of doing just that. He is an expert in information interchange, having been a member of the original SGML committee and involved in various XML-based standards. In addition to working as a consultant to large enterprise customers, Brian has shared his experience as an author, lecturer, and teacher to audiences all over the world. He lives in beautiful New Hampshire.

  • Mike Gifford

    Mike Gifford

    Mike Gifford founded OpenConcept Consulting Inc. in 1999. He has been particularly active in developing and extending open source content management systems to empower people to have more control over their own sites. Mike has been very active in building online campaigns for progressive organizations and politicians in both Canada and the United States.

    Since 2005, OpenConcept (OC) has been developing exclusively on Drupal. The OC team has contributed a number of modules to the Drupal community and promotes the use of Drupal within the government and non-profit sectors.

    Mike has been involved with accessibility issues since the early 1990's and is a strong advocate for standards based design. Since 2009, he has contributed to the accessibility enhancements adopted by the Drupal community, including improvements in Drupal 7 core. Mike has presented at DrupalCamp Toronto & Montreal, most recently on OC's work on accessibility enhancements.