Jeff Byrnes is a software engineer with over 8 years of experience working in web development and operations. Educated as a musician at Berklee College of Music, self-taught as an engineer, he has experience ranges from frontend to backend and systems. HTML5, CSS3, JS, PHP, Git and version control, Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, Bash, Linux, deployment, automation, and analytics; these are all the technologies and skills with which he is experienced and proficient.
Currently, part of the Operations team at EverTrue, Jeff spends his days supporting the engineering team, providing automation, server monitoring and maintenance, workflow improvements, and deployment solutions, as well as providing help desk support to the company at large.
Emil Lerch is a technical architect, leading teams to build web-based systems for enterprises since 1995. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Kelly and children Kathryn and Jack. His blog is http://emilsblog.lerch.org and he can be reached on twitter @elerch.
Doug Sparling works as a web and mobile software developer for Andrews McMeel Universal, a publishing and syndication company in Kansas City, MO. As long-time employee of the company, he has built everything from the GoComics Android app to registration, ecommerce systems, web services, and various web sites using Ruby on Rails. He's now busy building another site in Rails and porting a Perl-based e-mail system to Go. Some of the AMU properties include GoComics.com, PuzzleSociety.com, Doonesbury.com, and Dilbert.com.
He is also the directory of technology for the small web development firm called New Age Graphics (newage-graphics.com). After creating a custom CMS using C# and ASP.NET, all work has moved to WordPress since WordPress 3.0 was released, eliminating the need to ever run Windows again.
Doug is the author of a popular jQuery plugin, jClock.
Doug is a passionate advocate for WordPress and has written several WordPress plugins, can be found on the WordPress.org forums answering questions (and writing sample code) under the username "scriptrunner", and occasionally plays grammar nerd as a volunteer on the WordPress Codex Documentation team.
Other experience includes PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, Erlang, Python, Magento, and Perl. Doug was also the co-author for a Perl book (Instant Perl modules) and is a reviewer for other Packt books, including Mastering Android 3D Game Development and WordPress Web Application Development, as well as The Well Ground Rubyist, 2nd Edition and Learn Android in a Month of Lunches for Manning Publications.
In his less than ample spare time, Doug enjoys spending time with his family. Other passions include photography, writing music, hitting drums and cymbals with sticks, playing briscola, meditation, and watching countless reruns of Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Doctor Who.