About Hiveminder The Team
Jesse Vincent Fearless Leader
Jesse Vincent is the President and Founder of Best Practical. He's responsible for...just about everything around here. Jesse lives the Internet-Rockstar lifestyle and can most often be found writing code in trendy WiFi-equipped cafes across the US, Europe and Asia. When he's not busy hacking on Hiveminder, Jifty or RT, Jesse spends his time dreaming up crazy schemes designed to bankrupt Best Practical and drive everyone who works here insane.
Chia-liang KaoCo-Conspirator
Chia-liang (CL) is a partner in Best Practical and is the creator of SVK, the version control system that made developing Hiveminder so easy. He had the good fortune to be able to spend a year wandering mountain ranges and exploring natural hotsprings while developing SVK. While he currently lives in London, he is ever-vigilant in his quest for new hotsprings to enjoy. Previously, he lived on and worked from a hidden fortress/tea plantation in the mountains of Taiwan, the tea from which powered the development of Hiveminder.
Alex Vandiver Itinerant Coder
Alex is a recent graduate of MIT, where he majored in computer science. Before too long, he will head back to those verdant pastures for his master's degree, and we will miss him. He is known in some circles as the "duck-billed cat-a-moose" due to his proclivity for animal noises. Fond of both swords and software, Alex has yet to find a way to combine these passions in a productive way.
Meg Taylor Den Mom
Meg takes care of things here. She makes sure that Jesse's where he needs to be, that we all remember to eat lunch and go home at the end of the day and (perhaps most importantly) that everybody gets paid. She's also a student at the Muscular Therapy Institute and has been know to readjust the occasional set of RSI-damaged shoulders. We like Meg. When Meg isn't up to her eyeballs in work or school, she can usually be found with her nose in a good book.
Thomas Sibley Lord of the Antelope
Tom is responsible for how very, very pretty Hiveminder is. Although he calls southeast Pennsylvania home, Tom is a student at Amherst College, where he is a member of the class of 2010. He is considering bending his considerable aesthetic sensibilities to a career in photography once he graduates. In his spare time, he hugs trees, and - let's face it - they need the attention.
Kevin Riggle Minion
Kevin Riggle is a member of the class of 2008 at MIT, where he majors in electrical engineering and computer science. He is the President and Skinner of the MIT Science Fiction Society and recently wrote a 19-page paper detailing the the relationship of the television show Firefly to film westerns. His hair is (usually, mostly) blue.
Keri ShaughnessyPoster Child
Keri is responsible for Sales and Marketing at Best Practical. She's an organization fanatic -- she makes to do lists about her to do lists (using Hiveminder, of course), rabidly organizes her massive music collection, and obsesses over iCal and her Treo. When not organizing or marketing, she gets all hopped up on coffee and/or Red Bull and drives around.
Nelson Elhage Nap Hacker
Although deadly accurate with a bow and arrow, Nelson has never killed anyone. He is a member of MIT's class of 2009, where he is majoring in computer science and maybe physics. He is theoretically literate in both Latin and Ancient Greek, and has green hair. While working on Hiveminder, we forced Nelson to spend far too much time monkeying around with the deep, dark corners of a number of web browsers.
Shane Landrum Cat Herder Supreme
Shane graduated from Smith College in 1998 and subsequently wrote software at various dotcoms and web-consulting shops. He has been writing code and project-managing for Hiveminder while also studying for a Ph.D. in American History at Brandeis University. In his free time, Shane turns his attention to cooking, grassroots political organizing, and cycling.
Zev Benjamin Legionnaire
Zev's been responsible for making sure that Hiveminder (and every other Best Practical product) works right. This summer, he's applied his skills as a computer science major at MIT (class of 2008) to create a continuous-testing system called "Chimps" (The Collaborative Heterogeneous Infinite Monkey Perfectionification Service) and to maintain a feisty IRC bot designed to harass us all into fixing our code. He has been known to sport flowing, emerald locks, and to travel widely to such exotic locations as Spain, Italy, Britain, Israel, Turkey, Peru, and his native Dresher, PA.
Jason Haas Wordifier
Jason can hardly code at all, but he's pretty good with English so he wrote many of the words that appear in Hiveminder. He graduated with a degree in film studies from Wesleyan University, and recently completed a master's in education at Harvard University. Jason gets to blend his passions for film and improv comedy as the director of the Boston chapter of Neutrino Video Projects.
David Glasser Developer Emeritus
Dave built much of the first version of Hiveminder, as well as large parts of Jifty. He holds a BS from MIT in Computer Science and Mathematics, and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science. He had green hair long before Nelson did, and makes a damned fine peanut soup.
Shawn Moore Bot Wrangler
Shawn is responsible for the IM bots and some of the odds-and-ends of Hiveminder. While not a college graduate, he certainly got an unusual education in mastering the nuances of NetHack. His passion these days include learning and teaching Go, reading science fiction, and (naturally) hacking away at Perl.
