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 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, RailsConf, and RailsConf Europe and author or co-author of a number of popular software books, including the recently released "The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development"".

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 is our junior developer and comes to us from a recent tour of duty with the US Army in Iraq where he was a machine gunner on a Humvee. During his deployment he used his down time to read up and expand on his programming skills between trips around the country doing escort duty. During his time overseas he worked with our CTO, Chad Fowler on several Open-Source projects, which he used as a vehicle to hone his Ruby and Rails development skills. Anthony is involved in our internal product development projects and in work on client sites.

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.

Team photos by Douglas Sonders Photography