about us

john quinn

VP engineering with a wide range software engineering and IT experience encompassing over 17 years of industry experience. technology expertise in software development, relational databases and information architecture, ui and usability, distributed high-availability systems, internet applications and protocols and open-source technologies.

cailin nelson

vp engineering, development manager, project lead, system architect, software engineer with a wide range of development experience including web applications, distributed back-end systems, browser plugins and custom desk-top software. expertise in all stages of software life cycle, including business requirements, system design, quality assurance and post-release system analysis. specialist in open source software and complex third-party integrations (ebay, salesforce, shopping.com, drupal). primary expertise in Java, LAMP and CSS. experience in all software application layers, from RMI servers through CSS-based table-free design. strong analytical skills, combined with an insatiable curiosity about system performance.

cailin is currently director of engineering at kiva.org

our photos

we get asked alot about what kind of camera we use. the majority of pictures on our site are taken with a Canon EOS 40D with a 28-135mm lens. compared to an average camera lens, this is a mild telephoto lens. it's a big heavy camera, with a big heavy lens, and it costs around $1100.00. surfing pictures on our site are also taken with a Canon EOS 40D - but with a larger telephoto lens.

we also do some post-processing of our photos with Adobe Photoshop. this software application costs about $600 and is notoriously difficult to use for beginners. however, Adobe also makes a version called Photoshop Elements, which costs only $99 and contains all the basic functionality that you might actually use. rumor has it that some free and easy to use software (like picasa) also provides basic digital image manipulation. if you're not going to invest some time learning how to clean up your images after the fact there is no point in buying an expensive digital camera.

neither of us are professional photographers, although john has studied photography - both film and digital. the best 1% of pictures on this site are invariably taken by john. cailin is a photography novice, and has plenty of entries in our top 5% of pictures.

we're frequently asked if purchasing our camera will enable the "average joe" to take pictures like ours. in our opinion - yes - the right camera will take you a long way in the right direction. however - in this era of digital photography, the camera is only half the equation. to really get good digital pics, you also need some photo processing software (like Photoshop) and a 30 minute lesson in how to do three easy post-processing tasks. we particularly recommend a good digital SLR camera for parents of young children. in a typical photoshop of our daughter as an infant, we probably took 500 pictures - of which perhaps 3 were worth saving. a good SLR camera that dozens of frames per second is essential to catching these wiggly beings at their best!