Contributors

Christian Heilmann is a geek and hacker by heart. He’s been a professional Web developer for about eleven years and worked his way through several agencies up to Yahoo!, where he delivered Yahoo! Maps Europe and Yahoo! Answers.

He’s written two books and contributed to three others on JavaScript, Web development, and accessibility. He managed teams in the U.S., India, and the U.K. to release dozens of online articles and hundreds of blog posts in the last few years.

He’s been nominated Standards Champion of the Year 2008 by .net magazine in the UK. Currently he sports the job title International Developer Evangelist, spending his time going from conference to conference and university to university to train people on systems provided by Yahoo! and other Web companies.

Austin Markus is a Web application developer and principal of Ithus Digital in San Francisco.

He first got excited about computers and programming in the pre-Internet days, running a BBS out of his bedroom and marveling when people connected from around the country and the world. His early work included developing ActionScript demonstration applications for Macromedia and a Telex-to-Internet publishing system for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Today, he develops applications from e-commerce stores, to content management systems, to social networking applications.

Austin is a big believer in Open Source and has contributed modules to Drupal and jQuery among others. He thinks the next big thing will be pervasive computing and augmented reality. To this end, he is presently working on an application for the Android mobile platform to bridge the gap between the online and real world.