Dion Almaer
Who is Dion Almaer?
I am a Brit who came over to the US for college. I took my American wife back to life in London for a year, and have lived in each of the timezones in the continental US, ending up in silicon valley where I reside now. I grew up playing cricket and football… and still find it strange that my kids speak with an american accent. I was a Chemical Engineer who found computers to do computational research with Fortran, and quickly found that more fun that the chemistry I was doing.
Where and when did you start programming?
My first programming was on my older brothers Sinclair Spectrum 48k. I remember getting games as code on cards, and typing in the BASIC. 20 GOTO 10 FTW! I still miss that old rubber keyboard!
About Ajaxian project?
Ajaxian started out as a place to host code samples that Ben and I used in our presentations on “Building killer websites with DHTML”. The title of these talks changed the day that Ajax was coined, and we did a lot of s/DHTML/Ajax/ on the slides. The attendance to our talks grew immediately as the developers who were so focused on the server side for innovation again realized that the client could do cool stuff now! The client side Web was now a real platform.
In my Enterprise Java past I was editor in chief of TheServerSide.com, and loved developer communities. These genes kicked in again and I started to post about the awesome hacks and experiences developers were producing with “Ajax”, and Ajaxian.com was born.
What does your typical day look like?
Multitasking. I try hard to keep to my personal brand of GTD to get through the day moving forward. No day it typical these days though. I may be speaking at an event. I may be in meetings discussing the Web platform. I may be working with my Developer Relations team on how we can participate in furthering the Web ecosystem. Or, I may be writing code, building Web applications and trying to push the envelope in some way. I normally do a double shift, and when the kids are in bed, make sure I finish the day off with a dose of TechMeme, Hacker News, and Twitter.
What do you do in your free time?
Free time. Hmm. :) Most of that is spent with my 2 kids these days. My oldest is four and is a ton of fun. We can play football together now, or Angry Birds. Trips to Legoland for Star Wars weekend are on the cards… or hitting the beach for some fun in the sand. My youngest is 10 months and is now getting into trouble as he toodles around and tries to grab anything the 4 year old cares about.
Current favorite apps?
Rapportive is a social plugin for Gmail and is awesome (as I discuss here). Everyone who uses Gmail should install it.
On webOS I enjoy the Facebook app that my team builds, TweetMe (a beautify Twitter app), and playing with some of the great games on our platform. I keep up with them via the Fast Movers tab on our PDK Hot Apps promotion.
On the iPad I enjoy watching my son play Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, and setting up the Orion telescope with a sky map app.
What OS do you prefer?
I am a Unix lover, and switched to Mac OSX many moons ago. I am happily not recompiling kernels anymore…. and instead have the power of Unix under a nice shell.
Small picture for your Workplace?
I share an office with Ben Galbraith, my best friend and partner in crime at HP and beyond. He was my co-founder at Ajaxian, and we worked together at Mozilla too hacking on Bespin. We stock up our fridge, and pump up the music when the door is closed. Sometimes the “music” is something like Bed Intruder.
Favorite: Color, Font, Language, JS Framework?
Color: Blue
Font: Comic Sans as long as the word that is shown is Helvetica (see here)
Language: JavaScript or Ruby depending on the day
JS Framework: oh man. It still depends so much on what you are doing. I do still love Prototype though.
Name something that has inspired you recently?
Two things:
1. seeing how my kids can just use technology these days, and thinking about how education and technology needs to come together, and when it does, amazing things will happen.
2. seeing someone who was in immense pain in the past, now run around with a smile.
What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?
Tough one. I do think that we jump into employment too quickly (see here). I often jump between worlds. When doing freelance I get to work on small projects and explore new areas for other people. After awhile I want to do “my thing” though and get to employment…. and the cycle continues. :)
What are your personal projects and goals for 2010?
I want to show the world that the Web is *the* runtime that can power the future of diverse devices and experiences.
