The Wahanda Technology Team
We're quite a small close-knit technology team here at Wahanda.
As we all do a bit of everything job titles are more a rough guide than constraining boxes of responsibility.
Julian North
CTOJulian is supposed to be responsible for what the team gets up to. This is a challenge as he's not allowed to write site code anymore. Generally he just sits in his corner and mumbles things in SQL or PHP.
Prior to Wahanda he did something database oriented for lastminute.com, Travelocity, Reuters, worldsurface.com and others. Being a product of old-skool internet programming (Since Netscape 2) he's a big fan of <tables>, much to everyone elses amusement.
Oliver Elder
Services Team LeadA curious fellow Mr Elder manages to survive solely on a diet of Coffee and Toast. His main focus is Java and SEO. He also has this strange fondness for NoSQL architectures which we're trying to cure by infusing relational pellets into his bread supply. This isn't too hard as we control the supply chain. Oli has not yet been seen leaving the office during daylight.
Prior to Wahanda he was also at lastminute.com doing Hotels related things in Java (surprise). He has also inflicted his bizarre toast regimen on companies such as allhotels and Sun.
Bogdan Aldea
Java DeveloperThe very first non-founding member of the company Rogdon is renowned for his ability to render monitors to dust at the first sign of a technical story involving Javascript. He does like databases though so he can't be all bad.
Prior to Wahanda he was a specialist in linguistic analysis at universities in the UK and Romania. I don't really know what that means but it sounded very impressive in the interview.
Mike Pilsbury
UI Development LeadMike heads up our user interface team and is responsible for making all the fancy stuff be even more fancy.
I'm pretty sure he's been working in technology since an advanced user interface meant using different colour punch cards. If you want to reminisce about the days when 4k or memory was a really big deal (think pre-microsoft) he's your man. Directly prior to joining us he was at lastminute.com working as a UI Architect. He's also done stints at other startups and spent an age working for NatWest.
Leonard Charles
Junior UI DeveloperLeonard works on UI team with Mike. He's primarily responsible for doing whizzy things in CSS and Javascript.
Although primarily a PC boy he likes his new mac a lot. Well we think he does, he does point at it a lot. We're getting him used to the idea of using 10 words instead of 100 but it's a struggle.
Steve Haslam
Technical ArchitectSteve currently holds the trophy for most geeky member of the team (previous debian maintainer of sorts) and doesn't react well to badly written code. Recently something annoyed him so much he actually cracked his keyboard! It was very hardcore. Did I mention his keyboard has blue glowing keys! Even more hardcore! When not evangalizing Perl and Git to the rest of the team he's out running long distances.
Prior to Wahanda he was also at lastminute.com doing Operational things in Java. Back in the day he also spent time hacking for ARM and Excite.
Marisa Fewtrell
Product LeadMarisa is our resident product genius. If you've been following the site for any time at all you'll be aware of her recent handiwork.
Despite coming from Colorado she actually appears to have a sense of humour which is nice. The American germ-phobic tendency is still pretty strong though. Before joining Wahanda Marisa seems to have drifted aimlessly from html/css gig to html/css gig. Apparently she was working as a 'consultant' but I think that's just trying to sound grand.
Begona Fernandez
Software TesterWe weren't totally sure what testers do all day so we hired Begona, who was new to the idea as well.
Prior to Wahanda she was teaching children Spanish which apparently was mainly crowd control. As well as testing she is the primary gatekeeper for problems on the site and with our internal apps. That's pretty much crowd control too so not much change there.