• Read more about Intridea Insider: Patti Chan

She does it all: project management, programming, design, has created a successful startup, has run Ignite events on both sides of the coast, and she can cook up a mean braised pork belly. She's Intridea's Interaction Designer, Project Manager and more. In this week's Insider meet Patti Chan!

Anyone that has studied Psychology, Business and Graphic Design is bound to be an intriguing character. But it's not just the time she spent at Johns Hopkins and MICA that make Patti who she is today. Her career path began when she was a young teenager growing up in Allentown, Pennsylvania when she was asked to design a set of kids' program brochures for the Allentown Art Museum. "I got to design these tri-folds where Arty the Turtle led kids through various exhibits. I got to spend a lot of time at that museum. It's a small town but we somehow had an original Frank Lloyd Wright installation and an original Roy Lichtenstein. I loved the simplicity and how modern both pieces were. Seeing those for the first time got me hooked on design."

She was also a gaming nerd, and admittedly a Disney nerd too, which helped to solidify her future as a designer and developer: "I copied a lot of pop art, like characters from Nintendo Power and Disney. We got dial-up pretty early on, so eventually I found a copy of Flash. I thought I could make the next big Disney film with my drawings and Flash!" Although she didn't debut as a Disney filmmaker (a tough feat for any 14 year old), she did spend a lot of time playing with Flash. "Those swf's had to go somewhere, so I got a free Geocities account and taught myself HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And so it began."

You wouldn't know it from working with her, but she insists that design took her a while to get "good" at. "Coding always came naturally. I think I always had a good idea for how things should look, but mastering Photoshop to get that vision out took a long time. But I decided early on that I wanted to be good at design. I was ready to work for it, study hard in school, put in extra hours, do free projects, etc. So getting comfortable with it was just a product of hard work."

Patti got into Rails development through ColdFusion. She was moved onto development projects at her first job once they saw that she had basic programming skills and that was when she picked up ColdFusion server-side programming from her colleagues. "Later, when I was 'advanced' I stumbled onto MVC and tried to fit it onto my CF code. But Rails was a load off. It already was MVC!"

Eventually, Patti left that company to do her own startup, 600block. She used that opportunity to dive into Rails development. "It changed my job and my future because it made me a much better programmer, almost overnight." So what is 600block? "It's the largest collection of daily specials (happy hours, half-off steak nights, margarita Mondays) based in Baltimore, by and for locals." While she was developing the startup she was also busy freelancing and teaching on the side. She started at Intridea by helping out on various projects like HowAboutWe and Grub.it when she had time.

Now that she's been at Intridea full-time for over a year, Patti has her hands in a lot of different projects and she plays several different roles, sometimes all at once. But she's accustomed to switching roles frequently: "It's not always easy to switch between roles, but I've gotten good at chunking my time. Project management is about staying organized. Code fixes are fairly easy for me to squeeze in anytime, but I like to set aside a big block of hours whenever I'm working on UI. That's a different brain space for me."

Currently, she's on three projects including DealPop from White Pages, which she names as her favorite client to date. "Aside from PM, I'm the lead UI/UX for DealPop so I did the original design and graphics. I jump in for Rails work and smaller features, and do tweaking before each release." She's doing more UI design for a large financial corporation as well as project management for a new client involved in business consulting services. "The thing that I love about this, is that in one week I get to learn about daily deals, fighter planes, and hedge funds. In-depth!"

Patti lives in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, a place she describes as "lively, pretty and safe." She recently gave up her car and walks everywhere. She likes to spend time cooking and eating out, playing Dominion, browsing the library, and catching up on Hulu and Netflix. A voracious foodie, she has her thumb on all the new restaurants in the area, and she can even whip up a variety of her own specialities including some of her favorite requests: cantonese congee (with salted pork and thousand-year-old duck eggs), BBQ, and garlic eggplant. In fact, the first thing Patti wanted to tell me about during our interview was the Iron Cupcake throw-down challenge she participated in, a monthly Big Event in SF.

Patti also co-organizes and hosts Ignite SF four times a year (an event she describes as "TED on speed"). "After starting Ignite Baltimore with Mike Subelsky (another fantastic Rails guy who taught me a ton), I was fortunate enough to get involved in Ignite Bay area after moving to CA." She explains, "Ignite is a series of lightning talks. We get 16 passionate speakers up on stage at a cool venue to talk about whatever excites them for 5 minutes. They get 20 slides, and each slide automatically advances after 15 seconds. It's a high-energy format and a lot of fun. Ignites are held all over the world, and each city's event has its own personality. Our last one sold out to an awesome crowd of 450+, and our next one is in May". Patti also recently volunteered at TEDxSoMa, an event that was created, in part, to 'inspire collaboration and community.'"

Not one to enjoy working alone for long periods of time, Patti discovered the joys of coworking a few years ago and now works out of pariSoma, an "Innovation loft" in the SoMa district of San Francisco. "It gives me the best of both worlds: an office environment with lunch buddies, with the freedom of working remotely and managing my own schedule. I get to be part of two 'company cultures' -- Intridea and pariSoma, and they complement each other nicely." While she's working from her spot in the loft she's listening to Pandora "all day long" and drinking "lots of tea." Her current Pandora stations include Adele, Miike Snow, Florence + the Machine, Bon Iver, Lyyke Li and MGMT. To the left is a photo of Patti working on one of the couches at pariSoma.

She's a long way away from her Arty the Turtle artwork and her early sites on Geocities' Sunset Strip. Patti is an icon of the modern female innovator - bright, agile, avant-garde and polymathic. She's someone that you want to be around because she exudes vitality and ingenuity. And of course, we couldn't be more lucky that she calls herself an Intridean.

• Read more about Intridea Insider: Hao Liu

After a long winter break the Intridea Insider is back! We're kicking off the new edition with Hao Liu: a devoted open source contributor, Linux user, soccer player, and an integral member of the Intridea East team!

Hao grew up in Qingdao, a metropolitan seaside city situated in the Shandong Province of China. He is currently living in Qingdao again after spending several years in Beijing working for Red Hat and Oak Pacific, where he applied his computer science education and initiated his open-source devotion.

While at Red Hat, Hao tested open source software including Firefox, Thunderbird and xChat. It was during this period of his life that he became affected by the open source movement and has since dedicated much of his free time to working on open source projects. The first programming language he learned was Pascal when he entered the CS program at Qingdao University. He learned several languages throughout his undergraduate and graduate experience at Northeastern University in China, but he didn't learn about Ruby until late 2007 from a classmate.

In 2008 he taught himself Ruby with the aid of online resources like blogs and podcasts, and eventually he decided to take it from a hobby to a full-time job. That's when he left Red Hat where he had been working in C/C++ and went to Oak Pacific, the company that created RenRen.com, China's version of Facebook.

Hao fell in love with Ruby for its elegance, as most Rubyists do, and when he was offered a job with Intridea he saw the chance to both work with the language he loved and to move back home to Qingdao to be close to his family and friends. During the last year he has worked on various Ruby and Rails projects at Intridea and he continues to contribute to open source software as time permits. He's had the opportunity to work with most of the team at Intridea, and we all love him. Ted, one of our designers who worked with Hao on a recent project remarks, "He was able to adapt my designs and help me to understand the structure and reasoning of the app itself." Last year the Intridea East team met up at Ruby Conf China in Shanghai and Hao met all of his fellow teammates; "It was great to meet them in person, because none of them live close to me. But we don't look that pretty in the picture," he jokes.

Unlike many of Intridea's developers that work on shiny Macbooks, Hao prefers to work on a linux box running Ubuntu Dekstop 10.10 where he codes in Vim. His list of can't-live-without dev-tools include Git and Firebug.

Hao wasn't always a programmer. In fact, he didn't have internet access until he got to college. "Not having internet was a big reason I never knew anything about programming until I got to college. The internet really changed my life. Now, anyone can have internet at home if they can afford it. But back then, it was extremely rare to have it at home." He spent most of his youth studying in order to get the grades that would allow him entry into a Chinese university. He chose to study Computer Science because, "I didn't have a specific preference for any subject. But I had a computer in my bedroom and I loved it; so I decided to learn how to program."

Looking back, Hao has some regrets about how he spent his childhood: "Growing up in China is like living someone else's life." He goes on to explain, "I never really thought about what I wanted. I just accepted what I was told. You are taught that the only path to happiness is to spend your life studying - to be able to go to college - to be able to get a good job. Now I have discovered that there are other ways I could have led a happy life. My happiness derives from sources like my family and my friends, not just studying and working. Those are the most precious things to me."

He never had a lot of time for hobbies as a kid, but he does have fond memories of playing video games in the local arcades. "I remember being in the crowded arcades, full of smokers and punks." He always loved soccer and now that he's living back in his home city he spends every weekend playing soccer with friends. He lives with his wife, Haimei Wu who is pursuing her dream of being an entrepreneur.

Most of the Intridea team works remotely, and Hao, like many of us, was drawn to Intridea for that very reason. It affords him the ability to work with the language that he prefers and to choose for himself where he wants to live and work. The result? A happy programmer. And we're down with that.

• Read more about Intridea Insider: Sean Soper

He first learned to program on the side of an extinct volcano, trained in the Suzuki method from a young age, and describes Ruby as "mana from heaven." This week, in the Intridea Insider, meet Sean Soper, Software Architect at Intridea.

Sean started programming during the time he spent living on the side of an extinct volcano in Naples, Italy when he was twelve years old. "My Dad was a civilian contractor for the Navy. We didn't live on base, but on the side of this old volcano. There were no other kids around." When his parents bought an old Packard Bell PB500, "with a 8088 processor", he spent a lot of time with the computer for lack of other entertainment. "The installed apps bored me pretty quickly so I started writing my own. I probably read the entirety of GORILLA.BAS at least five times, which was significant given that it was about 5000 lines of code."

Aside from playing violin which was Sean's other passion as a kid, he spent a substantial amount of time on the computer. He programmed in Basic, Pascal, and of course his TI-85, before later studying Computer Science, History and Anthropology at Purdue University.

He discovered Ruby and Ruby on Rails a few years later while working in an IT position at a health insurance company in Florida in 2005. "I was told that I needed to re-do their health portal which had been done using J2EE by three previous employees. But I was just one guy, so I started looking at what technology was available, and I stumbled upon Ruby on Rails." After getting approval from management, in just a few months time he had recreated a significant portion of their health portal, and was nearly finished when the company hired new management.

Sean had been patiently persevering through IT positions since graduating from Purdue in 2002. His heart was in programming, but the dot com bust made the software industry impenetrable to him. Discovering Ruby on Rails only made him more tenacious in his desire to do full-time software development. "I was blown away by Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It was pure mana from heaven. I knew then and there that I wanted to do pure software development; like the goldfish that had grown too large for his bowl, I knew that IT would never be enough for me." During this time of frenzied growth as a burgeoning Ruby on Rails developer, he did his best to document his learning process on his blog.

Sean's experience with RoR opportunely landed him a spot at Revolution Health, Steve Case's healthcare reform startup in Washington, D.C. "After the company in Florida changed up their management, they wanted me to go back to configuring installations and working strictly in IT." When he got a call from a recruiter at Revolution Health, he didn't have to give it much thought before jumping on board with the company that was "vacuuming up every Ruby dev on the East coast." He describes working at Revolution:

Sean on Finding Ruby

"I finally felt that I'd arrived where I was meant to be. I was doing pure software development in a company made up of mostly other developers. It was the startup we were all promised we would work at back in the early 2000's in college."

His passion for development was nurtured in this fast-paced startup environment. "My experience there only inspired me to learn more. I started attending NovaRUG and NovaLang. I was introduced to core concepts that for some reason, were not taught in college. When I was in college they had already switched out to object oriented programming, and functional programming was seen as a weird science project. But Ruby by its very nature is both object oriented and functional. I entered this entire universe of programming that I didn't know about before, and I have Ruby to thank for that. It completely changed the way I code."

The Ruby community (within Revolution, NovaRUG, NovaLang and online communities) was a fertile ecosystem that nurtured growing Rubyists. Sean says that he's never found a community like this around other languages that he has programmed in. "When I needed help in other languages I'd stumble upon some expert's exchange post or a forum where people begged for help and maybe, just maybe got an answer. But with Ruby, folks built on those answers. It felt like a real community rather than a mob."

It was difficult for Sean to leave Revolution in late 2008. But with rumors of the company downsizing he turned his attention to BrowserMedia, a gig that gave him the opportunity to learn Objective-C and do iPhone development.

When he transitioned to Intridea the following year, his first project was HowAboutWe.com; "That project was a blast, especially working with Flip Sasser. I thought, 'if everyone is half as cool as this guy, this has got to be the best company ever.'" Sean has moved since into full-time mobile development at Intridea and he loves it. Earlier this year he worked on Oil Reporter, a crisis response app built in just three days, for the Deep Horizon oil spill disaster. His work on Oil Reporter landed him a spot on stage at TEDxOilSpill in DC this summer, where he presented the application to an audience of brilliant engineers, scientists, environmentalists and NGOs. Sean, not normally big on public speaking, was nervous to go on stage at TEDx. And despite some technical difficulties with the wifi during his presentation, his work was well received by the audience - and the confirmation gave him the courage to do a lightning talk at the Ruby Hoedown later that summer.

Sean enjoys going to the big conferences, but he still relies heavily on the Ruby community in the greater DC area. "I look to the small conferences and user groups to see what's coming down the pipe, because honestly, before these guys go to the big conferences they try out their stuff at the small local places. And the DC area is a great place for innovation right now." Now that he works from home most of the time he also depends on sources like RubyFlow and Twitter to stay afloat of Ruby related news. "My twitter feed is full of great local Rubyists who are always tweeting about the latest and greatest stuff. And over the years I've ended up working with most of them too."

Sean was recently married to his wife Sabrina in April of this year. He met her when they both worked at Revolution Health and they bought their first house last November in an established neighborhood in Maryland. They share their home with their cat, Ice. Sabrina works for Comcast along with several former colleagues from Revolution. Their wedding was in Maryland, but the ceremony was inspired by his wife's Taiwanese heritage. He flew to Taiwan last year, along with her family, to get his changshan (??), a traditional Chinese garment, for their wedding.

Sean travels in to the Intridea office 2-3 times a week because he enjoys being in D.C. but says that, "overall, I like working at home. Without the 45 minute commute I feel like I can get 90 minutes more work done!" Sean explains that working from home for a company like Intridea is what you make of it; for him, his work is also his reputation, so if he wakes up on Saturday morning with a solution to a problem he was working on the week before, he won't hesitate to sit down at 7am and start coding out the solution. "In a traditional work setting I would normally say, 'eh, it can wait until Monday.'" But Intridea's developers approach their work with a striking amount of passion, and the lines between work, home, and fun are often blurred.

While Sean certainly works a great deal, he insists that he does have hobbies outside of programming. "My non-computer hobby is canning and preserving. So much of what we eat is all the result of humans trying to preserve food longer than it was meant to be stored." This year he turned the tomato yield from his wife's garden into sun dried tomatoes, and canned a large batch of dill pickles. He also spends a lot of time working on his house with Sabrina. "The house, at 40 years old, is in good shape, but the previous owners stopped updating it during the Ford administration. Think earthy taupe colors. And horribad wallpaper." His current project is installing hardwood floors and recessed lighting in his home office. He's also a political junkie, and spends time on sites like Memeorandum for his fix.

Sean grew up idyllic Carlsbad, California. "Crime was nearly unheard of, the beach was nearby. For many people it was paradise. Yet at times I felt like that small town kid that needed to get out and explore a big city." Now, Sean lives and works in and around D.C., arguably one of the coolest cities in the United States. As for Ruby's role in all of this, he says, "I'd still be writing Java XML configuration files in some backwater IT department if it weren't for Ruby."

The best thing about working at Intridea for Sean, aside from programming, and being able to work from home is the people. "I love the vast collection of talent that I can ping at any moment if need be. I never feel separated from the rest of the company despite that we rarely see each other face to face."

Since Intridea hires some of the best Ruby, Rails and mobile devs across the country, Intrideans all partake in the benefits of being able to work with other talented people no matter where we live. People just like Sean. In a way, Ruby really has been "mana from heaven" for many of us. It has united our individual talents into a collective tapestry, while allowing us to work, live and play from the unique places that we all call home.

• Read more about Intridea Insider: Yong Zhi

In a country where people can't get internet access until college, and computers are not household items, a disciplined self-learner discovered his passion for computers and technology despite his own circumstances. In this week's Insider, read about Senior Engineer, Xue Yong Zhi.

Yong grew up in Beijing, China where he spent most of his youth studying to get into a good college. In his free time he took joy in reading comic books like Doraemon and Dragon Ball, and dreamt of one day becoming a comic book writer. Yong didn't have access to computers or the internet until college, and says that, "even in my generation in China, this still was early." Studying hard in school and performing well on college admission exams afforded him the opportunity to attend one of the few colleges in China that had internet access.

Yong explains that in China, your concentration in college is determined by your entrance exams. His strong grades allowed him to study Wireless Communications, but he admits that he didn't like it that much and with a sense of relief confesses, "thankfully, I soon discovered computers!" Yong later landed a job with a small group of hackers at NSFocus.com, which has since become a successful network security company in China.

The fact that he was able to get a job in the computer field at all was fortuitous; "We did not have many choices in China. For most people the major that you study is your career afterward." Yong was able to break out of that convention by teaching himself everything he could about computers, programming and networking while he was in college. "I did not spend much time on my major, only enough to pass the exams. I spent most of my time teaching myself computer and internet stuff. Telnet and BBSes were the most interesting stuff at that time, and I learned about things like internet security from there." He didn't have any peers or teachers in his department to study with or bounce ideas off; his learning was entirely self-directed.

When Yong began working for NSFocus.com after college, he learned about internet security and programming at an accelerated pace. He spent most of his time working on an intrusion detection system in C & C++. "Doing things that you like is priceless," Yong says. In a society where your future unfolds in a mostly determined and linear path, breaking out of the mold can be a difficult challenge. Yong now enjoys an unconventional life in comparison to the life he had in China. As a senior engineer at Intridea, he works and raises his son Alex from the comfort of his home in Maryland, with his wife. He came to the states several years ago to study Computer Science, and earned his Master's degree at the University of Delaware.

Yong learned Ruby when he was rewriting a web application at a previous company. "My boss liked C, so I had to use C to write the application (a strange requirement). I wanted to write a framework to make it easier for myself. After comparing lots of frameworks I found that I liked Rails's style the best, and I wrote a framework in C based on Rails MVC architecture. Although the project was later canceled, I was already really interested in Ruby and Rails, and taught myself the languages." Yong can program in C, C++ Java and some other languages, but prefers Ruby over all of them; "It makes things easy for me as a programmer. I can spend more time thinking about applications, rather than reinventing wheels."

At Intridea Yong has been working on a download manager for a large gaming client, which requires him to work on both a Windows machine and a Mac. But working on a PC isn't a bad thing for him. In fact, he's only been using a Mac for a year now. His history in internet security had him most often working with Linux, Unix and Windows operating systems on PCs. His favorite development tool, Source Insight is an editor for C, C++ and Java. "This tool is the best. No other tool even comes close. Few people have heard of it, and it does not support Ruby, sadly, but if I have some free time to do an open source project I will write an editor like that."

For Ruby development Yong uses Vim. In order to better understand the Ruby internals, he started writing a Ruby compiler, from the ground up over two years ago. "I gave up recently because it was just too much work to port all the libs into C extensions, and JRuby started to do similar things." Although he has since stepped away from the project, he was able to attain an in-depth understanding of Ruby while he was trying to learn the language.

Studying, working and living in the United States has been enjoyable for Yong, but he sometimes thinks of going back to China. "My parents, and my wife's parents live in China, and they miss their grandson very much." One thing Yong doesn't miss about China is the noise. He talks about how quiet it is here in the U.S. compared to Beijing; "There are people everywhere in China. You know how crowded the shopping malls get around Christmas time? In China, it is like that every single day."

I asked Yong if he feels that people in China are at a disadvantage technologically, because they do not have the opportunity to use computers or the internet until they are at least in college. He answers, "No, I do not think so. Smart people can learn things quickly." Yong is a bright example of that case. Being able to direct your own learning and thusly your own success is one of the common traits among all Intrideans. Yong's story illustrates that anyone, from any part of the world, given a dose of inspiration and vision can carve out their individual path to happiness and success.

• Read more about Intridea Insider: Amelia Saletan

She began college coursework at the age of 15, practices the Brazilian art of capoeira, and started her career by organizing fundraising events for political campaigns. She's part of the virtual glue of our company. In this week's Intridea Insider, meet Amelia Saletan, one of our champion Executive Assistants.

Born and raised in "the little blue dot in the sea of red," Amelia shares the story of her novel upbringing in Austin, Texas; "I lived across the street from a middle school and two churches and never set foot in any of them." She was home-schooled by her progressive parents, a chemist and a polling consultant. Amelia's blend of homeschooling and unschooling was enriched with formal math classes taught by her mom, correspondence classes in middle school, soccer practices, acting classes, and then college coursework that she added to her schedule at the age of fifteen. Between classes, self-directed learning, part-time jobs, and time with friends, she also spent 2-3 hours of her day in a pre-professional ballet program.

In referencing being homeschooled in Texas, Amelia admits, "We got weird reactions when we told people we homeschooled; it was kind of funny for me to realize people thought I must be strange. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I realized people thought we must be religious fundamentalists! But there was a large community of homeschoolers in Austin, and very few of them (if any!) were doing it for religious reasons."

Amelia set off for American University in Washington, D.C. after taking additional classes at a community college, working and spending some time traveling in Europe. "I had applied to ten colleges because I really didn't know where I wanted to go. They varied, but were mostly smaller liberal arts colleges. I ended up coming to D.C. and I got my Bachelor's in International Studies." Although she stuck with International Studies, she admits that her true love was domestic political campaigns. "After my freshman year I got a summer internship and stayed in D.C. I continued to intern for political consultants the rest of my summers here. I think students in D.C. are a lot more professionally focused than in some other parts of the country. People are very concerned about getting jobs, internships, and building a resume." While she was certainly driven like her peers in D.C., she says that really, "I just loved what I was doing. And it was way more interesting than sitting around at home."

The internships she had with consultants helped to develop and sharpen her research and graphic design skills, which landed her a job on the finance staff of a state race in Mississipi after graduating from AU. "I spent six months organizing fundraising events across the state. We unseated a 30+ year incumbent in the primary, but we lost the general election." Afterward, a job in political fundraising consulting brought her back to the D.C. area.

She found her place at Intridea after seeing an ad on Craigslist for an executive assistant. "I applied, and thankfully I heard back! No one responds to applications anymore!" After a few phone interviews, she met Dave Naffis, co-founder and Senior Partner, and she was hired to help run the administrative side of Intridea. The work she does is always changing, and each day always brings something new, but you can count on talking to Amelia if you call Intridea. She answers the phones, enters info into our CRM, fields HR questions, manages paperwork for employees and the senior partners, processes expense forms, pays bills, works directly with our accountants, and a hundred other miscellaneous projects that come her way. Amelia puts her research skills to use by scouting for and then scheduling relevant events that Intrideans might be interested in attending.

Amelia often works directly with the Senior Partners, including Chris Selmer, who is always confident about Amelia's ability to manage the chaos that comes with her position: "Amelia is the consummate professional - whether handling pushy salespeople on the phone, overdue contractors in the office, or dealing with HR issues over email, we know she leaves a lasting positive impression of Intridea."

The majority of Intrideans are programmers and work from the comfort of our home offices, living rooms and porches. Amelia's job, however, is a bit harder to do strictly from home, so you'll usually find her in our D.C. office. "Although working with a distributed team can be challenging sometimes, I like the flexibility of being able to work from home occasionally. It definitely came in handy during Snowpocalypse. I miss being able to go right up to someone and get an answer if I need it right away, but I'm learning to anticipate things in advance and bring them up." Internal communication aids like our enterprise microblogging and collaboration application, Present.ly, help to bridge the physical gap between our distributed team by essentially putting us all in the same virtual "room". Present.ly, along with other communication tools like email, Skype, and Instant Messaging help to make Amelia's job a bit easier whenever she has to communicate with distributed Intrideans.

Although Amelia isn't a programmer, we still consider her a "geek" by our standards. When she was a teenager in Austin, she helped run an online text-based role-playing game, Redwall MUCK. "It was similar to a MUD or MUSH, but there were no levels, so you didn't have to spend time leveling up. The focus was on good writing, good characters, and good stories. That's when I developed an interest in 1) how you get people to follow rules, 2) writing how-to documentation, and 3) making things as easy as possible for oneself down the road. For example: Developing good processes and good documentation = fewer questions and snags down the road." Spoken like a programmer! In fact, my interview with Amelia leaves me wondering if she might ever dive into programming one day. "I have an interest. But I haven't gotten around to it. I'm not sure if it will make it off my list of 'things I'd love to learn' onto my list of 'things I'm putting in serious time to learn', but we'll see!"

Amelia probably won't stay in the D.C. area forever, but for now she enjoys living in her upper NW D.C. neighborhood, which she says is "kind of like living on the main street of a small town." She has quick access to groceries, dry cleaning, little restaurants and a tiny movie theater. She spends several evenings a week doing capoeira classes, which she describes as a fluid, Brazilian martial art:

Capoeira

Capoeira is a dance, a fight, and a game, as people say. Capoeira has groups, which are a little like gangs, sort of like the dance-fighting gangs from West Side Story. I am part of Oficina da Capoeira, which is based in Brazil and has a presence in many countries. We have classes at BETA Academy in Columbia Heights. There's also an Oficina group in Baltimore. We work on technique and different movements and sequences in class, but when you actually play capoeira you do so in a roda (circle). People take turns going into the center of the circle, two at a time, and playing. There are slow and fast games, games that emphasize floreios (flourishes or tricks), and games that emphasize more aggressive moves. The people making up the circle and watching the two in the middle clap, play instruments, and sing songs.

Amelia maintains a healthy work-life balance, between her busy days with Intridea and her active nights of martial arts with a network of friends she has established at capoeira classes. We think of Amelia as an Intridea "support beam." Her efforts fortify and prop us up, so we can focus on the mechanics of programming, project management, healthy client relationships, code quality, open-source contribution, and more.

Much more than your average executive assistant, Amelia is unique in that she understands the tech space, brings PR and graphic design experience, and is self-directed (a quality she attributes to her education back in Austin). Plus, she can hang with the geeks as well as any programmer can, so we can't help but love her.

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

• Read more about Intridea Insider: Tom Zeng

Mastermind behind TweetSentiments.com, programmer of many languages, and reformed Java guru, Tom Zeng is a powerhouse. He's the kind of programmer that every one wants on their team, and he's the focus of this week's Intridea Insider!

Born to two chemical factory workers, and raised in an industrial city in the Hunan province in China, Tom focused much of his energy on being a good student at the factory's school. "I don't remember too many details, except that since around junior high-school, I became very interested in studying the sciences and I stayed in the top 5 in my class until I got in college." After earning a B.A.Sc at a university in central China, he was accepted into a grad program in Canada, at the University of Waterloo.

In undergraduate school Tom took programming classes in BASIC and FORTRAN, but he was never enthusiastic about programming until he was exposed to some business apps in grad school which piqued his interest in database software. While he was earning his M.A.Sc, he developed his passion for computer programming. "I worked as a research assistant for my supervisor, developing software for sports - an electronic playbook. That was my first paying job. During the same time I developed a database application for storing stats for a professor at the nearby Wilfrid Laurier University."

Tom, now a Software Architect at Intridea, has spent most of his adult life programming in Java in the banking and ecommerce industries. As "enlightened" Ruby developers, we realize how stodgy that world must have been for Tom. So when he discovered Grails, and eventually Ruby and Rails, he did what most of us would expect any Ruby neophyte to do: he went to his (Java) development team and proselytized. "I was never able to rally enough support in the development team which was composed of all Java developers. No one wanted to learn a new language. So I ended up learning and playing with Rails on the side."

Tom's journey to Ruby from Java was bridged by Grails: "My previous employer was in the corporate risk management field. It was a niche market and had a constant revenue stream throughout the .com bust and the recession. However, being a small company in a competitive field, we always faced resource shortages, and our Java app started to get increasingly complex. Features were either promised and never delivered, or, delivered but behind schedule. So I had been looking for ways to improve productivity. I heard about Rails three years prior, but never bothered to try it because it wasn't Java. Then Groovy and Grails came along, and I saw the Grails' equivalent of the 5-min blog app and got really hooked on it."

Thanks to a pushy Ruby evangelist, Tom eventually found his way to Ruby, despite himself. "I was on the Groovy and Grails mailing list, and there was this guy named Charles Nutter who was one of JRuby's developers. Charles kept bashing Groovy and promoting JRuby/Rails, which was really annoying at the beginning, until one day I decided to check out Ruby and Rails; I was amazed by it and all the plugins that Grails didn't have."

Although Tom couldn't convince his company to transition to Ruby to help with their productivity predicament, he found ways to get intimate with this new language anyways. He taught himself Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and it was during this period that he developed Tweet Sentiments, an application that uses machine learning technologies to analyze the sentiments of tweets. The site shows the Tweet Index, a calculation of the positive, negative and neutral sentiments of tweets worldwide. Users can plug in their own Twitter username to analyze the sentiment of their own tweets, analyze particular topics, or view the sentiments of every one else's tweets.

Tom explains the internals:

Tweet Sentiments Tweet Sentiments uses a machine learning algorithm called Support Vector Machines, which is based on very complex mathematics. Luckily, one does not have to understand the math behind it in order to implement it. I came across the LIBSVM C++ library developed by a professor and his team from Taiwan National University. It's one of the most popular implementations of LIBSVM. I wrote a Ruby gem to allow Rails apps to make use of LIBSVM. Tweet Sentiments actually uses LIBLINEAR which is a special implementation of LIBSVM that can handle large data sets at a decent speed.

While Tom was toiling away in the Java enterprise machine, learning Ruby and Rails, and finding time to create Tweet Sentiments, he met Chris Selmer, Senior Partner at Intridea. Last year, when Intridea needed a talented Rails developer, Chris called Tom and offered him a job. I asked Tom what it was like, to finally work with Rails full-time; "I think it's kind of this sense of relief. Ruby and Rails is just so much fun to work with; there have been a lot of "wow moments" as I discover all the things that can be accomplished so simply (with Ruby) that are such headaches to do in Java. Working with Intridea is very refreshing - ideas and innovation are encouraged, rather than feared like they are in a Java shop because it would mean more work that cannot be accomplished. In a Java shop the developer mentality eventually becomes, 'do as little as possible.'

By that definition, Tom has proved himself to be quite the opposite of a Java developer; he is the quintessential Rubyist. Thadd Selden, a project manager at Intridea, has spent a lot of time working with Tom on a large project, and speaks highly of Tom's dedication: "Tom is the ultimate "anytime" engineer. If I'm stuck on something at 2:30 in the morning, chances are he's up and tinkering too and can help me out. I don't know how he survives on so little sleep, but he's bailed me out more than a few times." Also, as a truly passionate programmer, Tom always loves learning new technologies; "Right now I am enjoying learning NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, Riak) and keeping an eye on Scala and Closure." He balances his work and technical hobbies with sports like rollerblading and biking.

Tom has settled down with his wife Jane and his 19 month-old son Luke in Ellicott City, MD, an historic community that is conveniently situated between Baltimore and DC. "I met Jane here in Maryland, but fate would have it that we were born 30 miles apart in China, and she went to a university in my home town. And here in Maryland, we worked a couple of miles from each other before we met." Jane works as a graphic designer in Annapolis, and their son Luke is one of the cutest babies you'll ever see. "He's so much fun. I always felt that I was not ready to have a child for many years, but I wish I had known that having a baby is so much fun." Ellicott City, MD is a far cry from the industrial city that he was raised in. Tom says that his hometown in China has been growing and changing throughout the last few years, but he's happy to be able to raise his son here in the states.

Most Intrideans love working from home and Tom is no exception. Being able to work from his basement office not only saves him from a daily 2 hour commute, it also allows him to use his HD projector as a monitor for his desktop. He likes working down there with his servers (he builds all his own machines); he's currently building a 48core 96GB and 12TB super-server for TweetSentiments.com.

We are incredibly lucky to have Tom as part of our team at Intridea. He brings a diverse collection of talents, along with a superlative personality to the team. We love him for his scrupulous programming skills and his infectious merriment.

 

• Read more about Intridea Insider: Jeremy McAnally

Not far from a real Magical Kingdom, in the enchanting city of Orlando, lives a great programmer by the name of Jeremy McAnally. By day he codes in Ruby; by night he engineers patterns for his wife's clothing design venture. And in betwixt he writes books on Ruby and Rails, manages a seriously good blog, releases Ruby libraries, and organizes Ruby conferences, bringing together the great minds of the language that he loves. But before I go off on how brilliant this guy is, let me back up and introduce you to a much younger Jeremy McAnally, of Huntsville, Alabama.

Jeremy grew up in and around Huntsville, an area that was occupied by McAnally's for at least four generations. "Huntsville is a pretty interesting area in that it has the highest concentration of PhD's in America, but is stuck in the middle of some of the most backwood areas you'll ever encounter. I grew up in Gurley, a small town outside of Huntsville, and went to a very small school with a small budget; so unfortunately my encounters with programming were scant until high school (and even then it was Pascal in a post-2000 age). My parents, (even though they were divorced) both identified that I had a knack for these new-fangled contraptions, so they invested a lot in making sure I had a computer to play with and learn from even though we often had a hard time putting food on our plates. But I think they saw potential there for me to escape our situation, so they definitely wanted to foster that."

His first run-in with programming was in the fourth grade; "I started using 1337 toolz and pr0ggi3z to punt people off AOL, make my chat pretty colors, etc. I got curious about what was possible, and I found out about this thing called Visual Basic that everyone was using. A few tutorials later, I was in business!"

When he was fourteen years old, faced with the prospect of selling newspapers door-to-door in the slums of Huntsville, he decided to lie about his age to work at rent-a-coder instead. "My family didn't have a lot of money, so I needed to start working early. I started out contracting, doing VB work for a variety of clients for a few years, along with writing some desktop software. It was lots of fun, but the money wasn't great due to the outsourcing and the race to the bottom." As luck would have it, he was able to score an invitation to an exclusively college student event that Microsoft was holding. "At that event I got a free copy of the first RTM release of VisualStudio.net. After that I progressed into doing VB.net and C# contracting, and started getting more into PHP. By the time I graduated high school, I was doing mostly PHP contracting."

Jeremy went on to college at a local state university after finishing high school in Gurley; naturally, he went in as a Computer Science major, but surprisingly he came out as an English major. "I REALLY sucked at math. So I changed to Computer Engineering, only to realize that it also required a ton of math. Then I switched to English." Meanwhile, Jeremy had met the lovely Jacki, his future wife. Jacki was studying at Johnson Bible College in Knoxville, TN, and the long distance between them was difficult. So Jeremy transferred to her college where he majored in Bible and Theology, concentrating on Teaching Ministry. He never finished his BA there; he was juggling so much PHP and C# consulting work that he eventually dropped out to focus on his career. He went on to teach himself Python and then Ruby and Rails in early 2005. He has yet to complete his BA, but he is working on it now through Troy University.

The lack of a shiny BA hasn't kept Jeremy from being insanely successful as a developer, or from being a critical member of our Ruby and Rails community. For the last decade, Jeremy has been working intimately with Ruby and Rails, contributing magnanimously to the ecosystem with useful libraries like dcov, rails-templates, and context. He has authored three books in the last few years. His first, Humble Little Ruby Book has often been compared to Why's Poignant Guide To Ruby for its creatively drawn examples and quirky writing style. He went on to write Ruby in Practice, a cookbook style reference for Ruby. Most recently, Jeremy released a self-published book, the Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook, just in time for the release of Rails 3 last month!

When Jeremy came into the Ruby community years ago, he wasted no time making himself comfortable. Now he's a regular household name among Rubyists. And if you haven't been to one of his Ruby conferences yet, there's no time like February! At this year's fourth annual Ruby Hoedown, Jeremy announced Magic Ruby, another (FREE!) conference for Rubyists, held in "Disney's Contemporary Resort" in Orlando, Florida.

"Every time I speak in public, I feel like I'm going to puke my intestines out and die in a fire." Jeremy is candid about what he refers to as his "social ineptitude", which is ironic, considering his history of organizing events and being an active member of the Ruby community. But despite his proclaimed introversion, he reveals that being in a tight community with friends and going to conferences really energizes him. Jeremy says that he was inspired to organize his own conference after attending conferences like GORUCO and MountainWest Ruby Conf. "I decided the southeast really needed a regional Ruby conference, so I organized the Hoedown. I'm excited about doing the Hoedown, and now Magic Ruby, and whatever else I can get my hands into. It's always always a good feeling to see people learning and hanging out, and creating a space where it's ok to be a nerd without it being work. Those are hard to find when you're an adult I think."

Sean Soper, Software Architect at Intridea, asks Jeremy, "What do you say to the folks who insist that a conference has to cost money in order to have value?" Turns out that Jeremy gets this question quite frequently: "I say they're crazy. I get e-mail after e-mail about, "oh you should charge for the Hoedown so you cut costs on yourself!" Or, "you should charge for your Ruby book! You could make a lot of change!" First of all, that's just not how I roll. When I approach ANYTHING, be it code, events, books, etc. I always ask myself, is there any reason I *shouldn't* just give this away. I would rather do that."

I asked Jeremy how his spirituality correlates with his work in the Ruby community. His philanthropic coding projects, free books and conferences, along with his sympathetic personality are indicative of his strong faith and entrenched morals. "You know, I never used to talk about it because I was really nervous about that. But I think because I try to be genuine about it and I'm not like, 'U IZ GOIN 2 HELL ZOMG' in people's faces, they can respect it (at least I hope they do). I like to think that I have built up a good amount of integrity in the community. I've always done my best to not rip people off, not lie to people, not be a jerk, be as helpful as possible, give as much as I can, and so on. That sort of ties back to my faith a little bit, but it's not like I'm trying to shove it on anyone. It's just a part of the lifestyle that I've chosen to lead, and I'm glad people seem to dig it rather than be repulsed or annoyed by it somehow." And then I see an opportunity to crack some joke about how he must get a lot of hate on Reddit for being a religious programmer, but he insists that Redditors have been kind to him in that department. "As for Reddit, I love it. I go there everyday. I like it a lot because they often hate the same things I hate: idiots burning qurans, fools protesting funerals, etc."

Jeremy is a software architect at Intridea, which means that he plays a pivotal role in designing and developing the architecture that supports large (and sometimes small) web applications. He's excited to be working on a new mobile app with our Director of Mobile Development, Brendan Lim. Down the road he plans to focus on additional mobile apps and will be starting in on a long-term, greenfield web development project.

When it comes to coding toolsets, Jeremy admits that his is "embarrassingly simple." He goes on to explain, "It's funny when I see people with these crazy vim setups that let them generate a complete Rails app in like 17 keystrokes or something. I use TextMate (or xcode if I'm editing obj-c but I'm trying to move that to TextMate soon too). I use it basically like a syntax highlighted notepad with a project drawer. I don't use snippets, I only use bundles for syntax highlighting. I use Test::Unit whenever possible. I use my Mac's system Ruby. If I try to get too fancy with my setup, I end up tinkering around with it too much and it gets in the way of doing real work."

Like most of the Intridea team, Jeremy works from his home office. Working from home isn't new to Jeremy though, who has only worked on-site for a couple of staffed positions in his programming career (which started at the old age of 14, remember). "I like the energy of an office, but I more often prefer the solace of my home." Unlike many distributed developers that I talk to, he prefers to work in the light. He throws open the blinds in his office windows, and codes to movie scores from Hans Zimmer, Klaus Bledelt, and even some Disney scores.

Jeremy's penchant for Disney music is endearing. He recently moved to Orlando, the city of Disney, with Jacki. "People usually move for jobs or family, but we had none of those reasons. So we thought, "why not move where we love to vacation?" Shortly thereafter they settled in their own vacationland, where they now get to watch epic fireworks shows from nearby Magic Kingdom every evening as they walk around the lake near their house. He's contentedly living out his "happily ever after." From a small boy in a financially struggling family in Gurley, Alabama, to a Ruby hero in Orlando, Florida, Jeremy McAnally is the "Rubyist next door" that we all love to love.

• Read more about Intridea Insider: Ping Yu

It's a typical love story. Boy becomes a developer. Boy meets Java. Boy spends years with Java in what he believes to be a righteous and dignified relationship. He hears whispers of a better language from far away lands, and her name is Ruby. Of course, the loyal and virtuous developer dismisses the rumors as unscrupulous stories, and he clings tightly to his superior languages and the comfort they bring him. But like all truly good languages, Ruby finds her way to the developer's heart, and she makes herself at home.

This week in the Intridea Insider, meet Ping Yu, Director of Asian Operations at Intridea, former Java and C++ developer, and veteran Ruby and Ruby on Rails evangelist.

Ping received a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, and another Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from The Catholic University of America. He spent his undergraduate time studying Computer Science from a prestigious university in China, where he grew up. "A lot of my friends were applying to graduate schools in the United States. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I decided to go along with it and apply too." After finishing his degree programs in the states, he joined a Maryland fiber optical company during its startup phase, doing Java, C++ and a lot of J2EE. After surviving a tough round of layoffs, he moved to a network security company, hacking linux kernel.

When Ping started college in China, he dreamed of being an architect, but a degree in Architecture was not in the cards: "You know, in China things are different. You have to get into the hottest field, and the hottest field isn't necessarily the one you like." Although Ping was exceptionally talented in programming and did well in his CS program, he always felt like he had to force himself to program.

His experience at graduate school in the states was more positive and helped to shape his love for programming; when he met Dave Naffis and Pradeep Elankumaran of Intridea years later, he was enticed to learn Ruby. "Dave and Pradeep loved Ruby. But when I picked up Ruby for the first time I did not like it, since I was so used to Java and C++. Ruby was too tricky for me, especially Rails." His first encounter with Ruby wasn't love at first sight, but the fling continued. "But once I understood the language and the problems it was trying to solve, I was in love. Now I can never go back to Java or C++. The languages put too much useless burden on the programmer. They are not as fun to work with as Ruby."

Ping came on board with Intridea during our infancy. He was employee #4, and has been part of the vision and culture of our company from the beginning. He has helped to grow Intridea from a group of four guys working at their dining room tables, to a company of 40+ Ruby and Rails developers and designers that span continents and multiple time zones. His work as Director of Asian Operations aims to bridge our Asian team of Rubyists with our centralized team in the states. "I believe in helping to extend Intridea into China. There is so much talent in China, it feels like a natural thing to do. Intridea has a culture of quality, and I want to bring that to these developers. They love Ruby, and they have so much energy."

Although Ping spent several years living in the MD/DC area, he now lives with his lovely wife, Maggie, in Minneapolis. He met Maggie in grad school, and she later went on to Georgetown Law School before becoming an attorney and accepting a job in Minnesota. They share their home with their beloved golden doodle, Jojo (a golden retriever and poodle mix). He prefers the warmth of the DC area to the numbing temperatures and tempestuous winters of Minneapolis, and mentions that he hopes to move back in the next few years.

Ping doesn't feel any loss over his break-up with Java or C++. A lot of his friends are still using Java and C++ though, so I asked if he gets into language wars with them, and he answered with distinct clarity: "There is no need to argue. They know Ruby is better." Joining Intridea and learning Ruby sparked his passion for programming, and he is confident in the decisions he has made. "The the thing that matters is whether you choose life or life chooses you. I am glad I chose Intridea."

• Read more about Intridea Insider: Raymond Law

He is a moderately reformed NBA fanatic and at one point knew the names of players on every NBA team. He is a serious coder, and spent six years working on battlefield simulations. You don't want to challenge him to any duels involving Physics. Or code quality. This week, meet our Senior Software Engineer, Raymond Law.

Ray taught himself Ruby and Ruby on Rails, but not before spending years programming in Pascal, C, and C++ and teaching himself PHP. His first language was Pascal, which he learned in high school while living in Hong Kong in the early 1990's. "I started programming in Pascal back in school in Hong Kong in 1992 because it was the language used in the public exams. And since I had a functional programming background, it was easy for me to switch from Pascal to C first, and then to C++."

Ray's family left Hong Kong to come to the United States when he was still in high school. He remembers struggling with leaving his life and his friends behind in Hong Kong; "I was just very sad to leave so much behind. I was on the right path to get in to a university in Hong Kong, so I didn't understand why my parents wanted to move." He later appreciated that his parents wanted to move for the potential of a better life for their family; and since he had a really good English instructor in Hong Kong, he already had a good foundation to start his new life in the states.

Armed with a love for both physics and computers, he entered college at Virginia Tech with the intention of majoring in Physics. "I liked Physics because I had a very good instructor in Hong Kong. I would tell people that the harder the exams were, the happier I was; I like the challenges of tests and applying my knowledge." He started out his first semester by taking an advanced level Physics class; "I got a bad grade on the first exam, but then I worked incredibly hard to get the highest grade on the final exam." He talks proudly about achieving that goal; "My professor personally told me: 'This is the stack of exam papers sorted by scores, and yours is on top.' I will never forget that moment."

Despite his enjoyment in studying Physics, Ray later changed his major to Computer Engineering and minored in Computer Science and Mathematics and finished college in only 3 1/2 years. He explains the difference between Computer Engineering and Computer Science: "Engineering is about finding solutions to problems. CS is more focused on theoretical ideas and algorithms." He has found his background in Engineering to be incredibly useful in real world situations. "Currently, I'm working on migrating a large amount of assets from a server-based file system to Amazon S3. It's a very involved integration but I love it because I'm solving a real problem. My engineering skills are very useful in this situation." He believes in taking small steps when he's programming, and he is extremely methodical; "Change one variable at a time and look at the results. Then you can have meaningful comparisons. As programmers, a lot of times we are inclined to implement the whole solution and hope that it works. But it rarely works that way."

For similar reasons, Ray believes strongly in testing and behavior-driven-development. However, he approaches testing with flexibility, based on the needs and requests of the end clients. "Realistically, some clients don't understand the value of testing and it can be hard to convince them of the advantages. I try to explain to clients that if we are allowed the time to write good tests, it will result in better quality code and it will help them down the road."

Ray really understands the dynamic of the client relationship. He talked with me about the importance of understanding where a client is coming from and noted that oftentimes the client knows what they want, but they don't have the technical knowledge to understand the process that must be taken to bring about their desired results. "It's important to explain our technology decisions and talk them through how the code works if that is what they need. Clients hire us because they don't know how to do this themselves. It's the same reason that I hire someone to do my landscaping; it's not that I'm ignorant and couldn't learn to do it myself, but I am using the time I save to do other things that I am good at. So when I respond to clients, I try to be specific and encouraging so that they understand that we are here to help them, not laugh at them. I think that is an important understanding for us to have."

Perhaps it's Ray's gentle and understanding nature, combined with his explicitly genius talent for problem solving that makes him such a great developer. Whatever it is, we are fortunate to have him on our team. Ray enjoys working with us too: "I am just enjoying my life - I have a great family of my own, and a great job at Intridea where people value each other." Ray lives in Virgnia with his wife Vinly, whom he met his freshman year at Virginia Tech. Vinly majored in Architecture and found a great firm to work with after graduating. They have a baby girl, Chloe, whom they adore completely. Ray says, "Chloe is the best thing. Nothing compares to Chloe smiling at me."

Ray works from his home office, and enjoys the flexibility that being part of a distributed team affords him. "I work very effectively at night. When you work in the office, there are many distractions. So I enjoy working from home so that I can arrange my schedule in order to do my best work at nighttime. I often work until 4 or 5 am." Before joining the Intridea team, Ray worked as a DOD contractor on battlefield simulation software for TARDEC, the U.S. Army's Tank and Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center. He spent six years with the DCS Corporation before he met Dave, Senior Partner at Intridea. By this time, Ray had already taught himself PHP, Ruby and Rails and was using Rails for several personal projects, including a list application and a small app for locating local badminton playing locations. On learning Rails, he reflects, "Learning Rails was so intuitive to me because everything seemed to make perfect sense. Stuff like convention over configuration and MVC just made sense to me. I think Rails understands the pains of developers and tries to ease or eliminate the pains so we can focus on application logic."

Thinking back to his old life in Hong Kong, I ask Ray if he has any lingering regrets now about leaving his life behind and moving to the states: "Nobody knows what would have happened if I hadn't moved. So I am not looking backwards." In the end, it all worked out - a brilliant and lovely wife, adorable baby daughter, his parents and brother living nearby in Virginia, working for a company he believes in and programming in a language that he loves.

 

• Read more about Intridea Insider: David Potsiadlo

He can turn empty pixels into tasty bits of candy; with only a touch of his fingertips he transforms the mundane into the extraordinary. This week in the Intridea Insider, meet our prodigious web designer, David Potsiadlo.

"Pots", as we call him, is loved by all of us at Intridea for his artful and brilliant designs. His most famous work at Intridea was the redesign of Intridea.com that went live early this year. Aside from his stunningly simple and creative designs, what is most fascinating is his design process and sources of inspiration, which we talked about at length during our interview.

Pots draws inspiration from several sources, with an overall approach to design shaped by the writings of the author and comparative mythology scholar Joseph Campbell. "The goal with the Intridea redesign was to incorporate the spirit of the old site (the grass, trees, and sky), while simultaneously incorporating design elements from Michael's most recent design (the fuchsia, beige, etc)."

Pots then explains how this quote from Campbell, "we live today in a terminal moraine of myths and mythic symbols", inspired him during the preparatory stage of the design process. "What Campbell is saying is that we, in the modern world, are surrounded by the remnants of symbols and images by which people in the past used in their attempts to express the inexpressible. New mythic structures seemingly always grow out of old ones, and include symbols and that the previous ones had. This is often equally true with the forms of a visual design." Pots believes that a website can be the "visual spirit of a company." He reasons, "So, I thought it right – and perhaps more importantly, helpful – to honor the existing design (Michael’s) along with our original Intridea design." On our new site you'll see clouds, grass, hills and trees, along with some of the fuchsia and beige elements that Michael introduced in his previous design.

After collecting ideas on the inspiration board, he focuses in on a specific direction and design concept. "The next step is tricky, and I think where the magic hopefully happens. The idea is to look at the old and existing, and let it pull you in a way that 'takes you past it.' The idea is not to get stuck on existing visual design items used by others." He also has to ensure that the aesthetics he used were not stuck in the cliched past, "but rather, indicative of new trends and forward motion in design." Pots talks about Campbell's interpretation of a mythic symbol and relates mythic symbols to design elements: "His interpretation is that the symbol should be 'transparent to transcendence': In other words, it should allow us to take the symbol in, and allow ourselves to not get stuck on the symbol itself, but rather what the symbol points to." Ultimately, Pots fully acknowledges that the most important aspect of all of this is whether or not the final design speaks for itself and actually works. "In the end, if the final product doesn't do its job, then all this talk about inspiration and process doesn't really matter."

Although his process is alive with notions of mythological theory and visual philosophy, it can be summed up quite simply: "My process for all new sites starts like this: get a vague, abstract idea of the vision I want to achieve. Next, look for examples of sites using similar visuals. Next, I organize my inspiration into an Illustrator file. Collectively, the goal is to use these elements as a springboard to create something alive and new." Here is a look at the initial inspiration board he created for our current site design:

Pots was in the fortunate position of having a substantial amount of time to devote to this particular redesign project. He admits that in general, the constraint of time can often reduce the scale of each step in his process. "I think a big challenge as a growing designer is to realize that every site can't be the most-epic-process-ever-omg." And when he is under restrictive time constraints he finds that, "Ultimately, communicating with clients to rein in their design expectations" is important.

Pots’s creative talents revealed themselves at an early age. Long before he started with Intridea, he drew Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for his classmates' trapper keepers in the third grade. Always inspired by his older brother, whose drawings he loved, he started drawing when he was very young; "Sketchbooks were the medium of those days. Tons of blank pages." He had a habit of doing each new drawing on a random blank page in the sketchbook; "The idea of going through the pages in linear order was the opposite of my instincts. In a sense, this made finding a new blank page kinda tough when the book began to get full, but it was still the way I enjoyed doing it. I had to find the right blank page for my drawing at that particular moment." He loved drawing cartoonish war and battle scenes over ocean backgrounds, complete with battleships, attacking planes, helicopters, and submarines. Much of the drawings in his later years were inspired by the backstories for his favorite video games like Dragon Warrior, The Legend of Zelda, and Diablo.

In between drawing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for his third grade classmates and working at Intridea, he grew up in suburban Maryland where he loved exploring the forests, playing video games, piano and ice hockey. Pots went to college at the University of Maryland where he started out as a Computer Science major. He had done some programming in high-school as an extension of his gaming hobby. "One useful side effect of all the PC gaming was getting comfortable with DOS. I quickly grew comfortable learning basic command line stuff." He had several PASCAL and C++ classes in high school. "As much as we coded, we also learned how to get around the computer lab’s security codes so we could play Quake 2 on the LAN." But he wasn’t in the Computer Science program very long; "After 3 months I firmly decided to quit that major; it was lifeless to me. Not in a judgmental sense, but rather on a personal level: at that time in my life, it too closely represented the path of non-discovery."

Pots majored in American Studies which gave him the flexibility to focus on sociology and music. "Sociology allowed me to continue learning about different global situations and introduced me to my budding interest in tribal religion, which grew into a passion for comparative mythology." His music major allowed him to deepen his understanding of music theory after playing piano for ten years and augmented his passion for playing guitar, which he claims was his "unofficial major" in college.

After graduating, Pots worked waiting tables, playing gigs at local bars and coffee shops, and devoted a lot of free time to creative writing. It wasn’t long though before he realized he needed a "real" job, and he got hired with the Chesapeake Research Consortium. "That gig had me handling various tasks, including maintaining a website. Best of all, they had a training budget. I could buy books dedicated to HTML, CSS, Photoshop and Illustrator. This was heaven." He looked to sources on the web like Zen Garden for guidance as he taught himself the gentle art of of web design. As he learned Illustrator and Photoshop, he discovered ways to take characters from his creative writing and put them into visual form. His creative writing not only inspired his art, but it also motivated him to re-approach guitar from a new perspective: "I became interested in the possibilities of writing esoteric folk songs, instead of just playing what people in coffee shops wanted to hear."

After working at CRC for a few years, he started freelancing on the side. "I was taken by the web possibilities and how it could be translated into a career. I freelanced for about a year, and did everything you see here:

He spent a year doing freelance work before he ran into Chris Selmer, Senior Partner at Intridea while he was at a DC tech event. "I was hired shortly thereafter. It was a dream," he reflects.

It didn’t take anyone long to discover how talented Potsiadlo was. In addition to rolling out our new website design, he has been busy designing for several client projects, including EarthAid and HowAboutWe. He works from his home in Maryland where he lives with his wife, Shannon, and their baby girl, Norah. He enjoys working at his home office, but admits that he really loves working in coffeeshops too: "Sitting in chairs previously used by others doing their own respective work, drinking from mugs once used by others while doing likewise. The ambience of creativity in these settings is one of my favorite things. I think my favorite encapsulation of all this comes from this TED talk (author Elizabeth Gilbert, on creativity and genius.)"

Though he certainly loves music, he prefers to listen to podcasts while he works. "I think podcasts represent an awesome realm of creative use of the internet." His favorites include Leo LaPorte’s TWiT.tv network, the sports and pop-culture ramblings of Bill Simmons, and geeked-out movie conversations on The /Filmcast. When he's not having fun with his family or being creative with music, images or language, he enjoys doing work in his home's garden and watching sports on the TV.

Potsiadlo could be considered a Homo Universalis, a modern day Renaissance man. From his clever sketchings, to the intricate songs he plays on guitar and piano, to ice hockey, to his interests in global issues, to his love of comparative mythology, to creative writing, to the art that he creates for the web. It’s hard to believe so much talent can come from one human being. Then again, Pablo Picasso may have said it best when he reminds us that the artist is not just a set of eyes or ears, but a political being:

"What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he is a painter, or his ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet, or, if he is merely a boxer, only his muscle? On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heartrending, burning, or happy events in the world, molding himself in their likeness."