LULLABOT - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Front - End Developer
- Senior Front - End Developer
Adam Varn is a front-end developer who built his first website in 1997 when he launched "Adam's Game Reviews" for a local ISP portal. The ISP paid him in video games. To earn actual money for his work, he started building sites in HTML and Cold Fusion.
In 2008, he began creating his first Drupal themes, learning the ins and outs of Drupal site-building and configuration. Before joining Lullabot, he ran his own Drupal development company, where he helped solve problems for non-profits, advocacy organizations, local government, and educational institutions.
Adam's past clients know him as a clear and timely communicator. This trait and his dedication to front-end development have made him a sought-after resource throughout the Florida Drupal community and beyond. He is a co-founder of his local Drupal Meetup group and is a frequent speaker at Florida DrupalCamp, becoming a co-organizer in 2020.
Notable accomplishments of Adam's are his leading the City of Tampa website rebuild project as a front-end developer and working as lead developer for FAU Foundation, Inc.
Adam lives in Tampa with his wife Lisa, their two children, and two cats Bisque and Elton John. When not tweaking that one last CSS property, Adam enjoys keeping up with the news, board games with friends, watching college football and soccer from around the world, and binge-watching TV shows and movies across the many, many streaming services out there.
Job Titles:
- Technical Project Manager
- Technical Project Manager / Houston, TX
Albert is a technical project manager with over 10 years of experience managing, developing, and architecting enterprise-level web projects. This experience has helped him solve problems for organizations in higher education, government, tech, sports, entertainment, and finance.
While at the Memphis Grizzlies, Albert helped launch a new mobile app that included integrations with mobile tickets, contactless payments, augmented reality, live streaming, mobile games, and more. With a developer's background and attention to detail, he knows how to spot potential opportunities and potential problems.
This is Albert's second stint at Lullabot. We loved him so much that we had to have him back. Albert has also been a speaker at Non-profit Industry Summit during DrupalCon Portland 2022 and served as a Drupal Discover Mentor 2021-2022.
He lives in Houston, TX with his wife and son. In his free time, he enjoys collecting art and books, traveling, cooking, reading, writing, and recording music.
Job Titles:
- Senior UI Designer
- Senior UI Designer / Sacramento, CA
Alycia is a designer with a strong background in visual design and creative arts. She graduated from California State University, Chico in 2016 where she was awarded the title of Most Outstanding Graphic Design Student and began her career working in print and branding space. It wasn't long before she pivoted her focus to UX/UI where she found a greater sense of satisfaction and collaboration in her work. She loves the complexity of responsive design, learning about front-end development, and seeing static designs come to life.
Before joining Lullabot, Alycia spent six years as a Senior Designer at a marketing agency where she worked directly with clients to develop the user experience and visual design of their websites. She also led several print, illustration, and branding projects from concept to completion. She has helped many businesses clarify their message and generate leads by designing solutions that are both visually appealing to their target audience and accessible for all to enjoy.
Alycia lives in Sacramento, CA with her husband Justin and dog Rocco. When she's not designing she enjoys getting outdoors, traveling, creating art, thrifting, and tackling new DIY projects around her home.
Andrew is a technical architect and developer who works at the intersection of business and technology. His journey with Drupal and PHP started with a student website that needed to change a sentence in the site footer. Two months and a migration later, Andrew was thoroughly convinced of the value of Drupal and its community. He has made many contributions as deviantintegral on drupal.org to many modules and Drupal core, as well as helping to organize the Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group. Since joining Lullabot, he's helped architect and build products for clients, including the State of Massachusetts, DocuSign, and the American Booksellers Association.
Andrew enjoys going beyond Drupal and PHP, supporting Lullabot's team in DevOps, security, and project management. Most recently, he's been exploring home automation, giving him opportunities to deepen his expertise in Python and TypeScript. He also led the discovery and architecture for the American Bookseller's Association Drupal 9 e-commerce platform.
Andrew has a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Guelph. While researching there, he specialized in Human-Computer Interaction and online security. His research interests include perceptions of privacy online and visualization of security and privacy threats. Andrew lives in Guelph with his wife Julia, two daughters, and their cats.
Job Titles:
- Senior Front - End Developer
Job Titles:
- Senior Front - End Developer
Job Titles:
- Senior Developer
- Senior Developer / London, United Kingdom
Betty Tran has always loved coding. She knew it was something she wanted to pursue in a career from a young age- she built her first website about her favorite video games. Betty completed both her Bachelors degree in Computer Science then Masters Degree specialising in Intelligent Web Technologies at Queen Mary University of London in 2009. She started with Drupal after she landed her first job in a small consultancy building websites. Betty went on to build cross platform (iOS, Android) mobile applications using Titanium and most recently has been working on enterprise projects supporting and advising customers with their app development at Appcelerator. Betty is passionate about design patterns and always looks for ways to write clean, scalable and maintainable code.
Betty grew up in Shoreditch, the neighborhood in London with the highest concentration of artists in Europe. She eventually moved further east to enjoy long walks in the local country park with her husband, Raj and dog, Bear. Betty's hobbies include participating in hackathons, baking geeky themed cupcakes and traveling (to experience culture through food).
Job Titles:
- Technical Project Manager
Job Titles:
- President
- President / Dallas, TX
Brian Skowron found his way to the web through the route of traditional media. He's always had a passion for media theory and communications, and that passion manifested itself in roles with Fox and Univision Radio.
But Brian truly earned his account chops in the technology world, selling managed hosting services for complex web applications at NeoSpire and Logicworks. Even within this nuts and bolts industry, Brian consistently found himself drawn to high-profile web projects and the unique challenges they provided. It was on these projects where Brian was introduced to Drupal and witnessed its capabilities on a large scale.
At Lullabot, Brian prefers to listen and help solve problems instead of tooting Lullabot's horn. (Well...he might toot Lullabot's horn a little bit.)
Brian lives in Dallas with his wife Adrienne, with whom he shares a love of travel, karaoke, and good food. He's a huge fan of baseball and hopes to share the game with his son, Dash.
Bryan is a back-end developer and has been involved with Drupal professionally since 2013. His ability to learn different technologies on the fly has led to him working with javascript libraries like AngularJS and more obscure databases like Raisers Edge, integrating various APIs to provide needed solutions.
While earning his BAH in Computing and Information Science and MSc in Computer Science at the University of Guelph, Bryan helped develop the first Drupal site for the Society of Computing and Information Science. Since then, he has worked with agencies on projects for a pharmaceutical company and various departments within the Government of Canada, including Defence Research and Development. He has also helped solve complicated problems for clients like Bravo, IBM, Michael J. Fox Foundation, and NewsBank.
Bryan was born on Canadian Forces Base Lahr in Germany but found his way to Waterloo, Ontario. He lives there with his wife and son, where you can find them speaking English or Cantonese (he's still learning), depending on the time of day. In some of his spare time, he enjoys collecting, constructing, and painting Warhammer 40,000 miniatures.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Board Member / Fort Worth, TX
Catherine Rude has worked as an attorney since 2010, specializing in complex and sophisticated tax matters before the United States Tax Court and Department of Justice Tax Division. She is currently Managing Director of Brown, PC, where she deals with the typical problems of all service companies: finding new projects with current clients, managing employees, team building, and making sure the firm has adequate billable hours.
Catherine was awarded a Master of Laws in Taxation from the University of San Diego, where she was honored as a Merit Scholar. And she received her Juris Doctor from the University of Washington.
Before practicing law, Catherine was a comedy sketch writer, magician's assistant, and performer on stage and television. Her unique talents contribute to her ease of communication when representing clients in tax controversy matters.
She lives in Fort Worth, TX with her husband who is the kindest person she knows, and her daughter with whom she sings/shouts Broadway musicals together.
Job Titles:
- Support Team Manager
- Support Team Manager / Lansing, MI
Cathy's wide breadth of experience has positioned her well for her role on the Support & Maintenance team at Lullabot. Combining thoughtfulness, technical skills, and strong attention to detail, she is a problem solver. Having worked with Drupal since 2006, Cathy is also an excellent programmer, as her many Drupal Core contributions show, and was the first recipient of the Aaron Winborn Award, which recognizes individuals who demonstrate personal integrity, kindness, and a strong commitment to the Drupal community.
Over the course of her career, Cathy has worn many hats, including Unix sys admin, computer hardware repairer, freelance Drupal site builder, Drupal 6 to 7 migration project manager, and Drupal 8 Core contributor. Additionally, she has been a Drupal developer for a large legacy Drupal-based product that combined with Drupal 8 components to serve many large scientific and academic institutions. Cathy's expertise includes coordination, investigation, and optimization for deployment, performance, and load testing.
Cathy has always brought people along on supportive, transparent, collaborative learning journeys. She has taught adults as a computer science professor, dog trainer, peer-to-peer mother support counselor, and open-source contribution mentor and organizer. Her focus in each role, including at Lullabot, is helping others achieve their goals.
Cathy previously managed the Tugboat project team that implemented automated tests and deploy previews and helped document evolving processes while working with the customer internal development team at Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF).
Cathy earned a Bachelor's(Computer Science and Electrical Engineering) and a Master's(Electrical Engineering) degree from Purdue University in Indiana. In her spare time, she loves tinkering with her high-tech garden.
Job Titles:
- Senior Technical Project Manager
- Senior Technical Project Manager / Denver, CO
Faced with the daunting re-architecture of a homegrown CMS in 2007, Chris' company found Drupal, and he hasn't looked back since. On his way to Lullabot Chris worked for local Drupal companies and as a freelance developer, including the National Renewable Energy Lab where he led a team to produce a Drupal-based tool that became a required government resource for commercial and home weatherization.
Prior to joining Lullabot, Chris developed a unique editorial layout tool on Blastr.com. He also hosted a podcast called "Behind the Screens" interviewing members of the Drupal community.
Chris was ecstatic to join Lullabot as a back-end developer on the SyFy Channel redesign. Seeing that project from the management side, Chris has gone on to many other projects as a lead developer and eventually converted that leadership into a project manager role. Chris took on the challenge of streamlining IBM's Drupal experience and most recently has been leading a team of more than 30 people as the client migrates to a brand new CMS.
Job Titles:
- Senior Front - End Developer
Job Titles:
- Senior Front - End Developer
Job Titles:
- Senior Front - End Developer
Job Titles:
- Director of Projects
- Director of Projects / Denton, TX
As an accomplished jazz musician and father of six kids, Darren switched gears a while back to look for more lucrative ways to make a living. He got into web development using PERL and PHP3 back in 1999 and got into Drupal in 2007 while he was head of the University of North Texas Web Development Center. Before joining Lullabot, he worked on various projects for higher education institutions and led the construction of major Drupal sites at Scholastic.com.
Though a Drupal development talent in his own right, Darren was a technical project manager for Lullabot and is now the Director of Projects. His expertise in organization and Drupal has resulted in successful projects, including leading improvements of msnbc.com, re-platforming a major internal news site for Qualcomm, and launching nammfoundation.org. Darren was at the helm of launching the state of Georgia's GovHub, which included websites and services for more than 80 different programs and agencies.
Darren prefers Agile to Waterfall and has an interest in the history of software development and how that's shaped the way we work today. He runs his scrums from his office in Denton, TX, where he lives with his wife and kids. When he's not overseeing projects, Darren continues making music, having the ability to play six instruments.
Job Titles:
- Director of Support & Maintenance
- Director of Support & Maintenance / Springfield, PA
David's passion for business and technology has guided his professional career in marketing, development, and project management. His eagerness to learn new technologies and solve complex problems in the simplest way possible has helped him succeed as both a Drupal developer and senior technical project manager.
David began working with Drupal back in 2005 while employed at an e-commerce company in Malvern, PA. Not long after, he was hired by Sony Music and moved to New York City. While there, he had the opportunity to work with Lullabot to build the MyPlay music portal as well as a Drupal multi-site installation that powered hundreds of Sony artists' websites. From there, Drupal took him to San Francisco where he worked with Lifetime Television, but his heart was still on the East Coast. He moved back to Pennsylvania and started his own development company Rapid Waters Development which was acquired by Lullabot in 2010.
David was a part of the initial group of developers hired to build Lullabot's development services, and he established the support & maintenance department.
When David is not writing and organizing Jira tickets or hacking away on code, you will find him spending time with his family which includes his wife, son, two dogs, and a cat. He is also completing a bachelor's degree online at the University of Maryland University College with a major in Digital Media and Web Technology and a minor in Computer Science. David enjoys watching movies, listening to live music, hanging out by the fire pit, and cooking on the grill.
Job Titles:
- Director of Marketing & Business Development
- Director of Marketing & Business Development / Fort Worth, TX
Ellie accidentally fell into marketing while living in Austria and bumming around Europe after graduating from college. She realized she could legally stay longer in the country if she became a student, so she enrolled in the Master's program at Webster University and studied marketing. Despite not having any experience in the discipline aside from the Marketing 101 class she took during her undergrad studies as part of her minor in business administration, Ellie prevailed and has been hooked on marketing ever since.
After graduating, Ellie went on to build a diverse career developing and executing multimedia strategies and campaigns for the entertainment, tech, and media industries. Getting her start with MIT's Technology Review Magazine, Ellie then went to Los Angeles, where she worked on campaigns that drove impressive results for home entertainment releases, including, The Twilight Saga films and the Academy Award-winning, The Hurt Locker. Leaving vampires and palm trees behind, Ellie came full circle, geographically speaking, returning to her native Texas where she worked at Bottle Rocket Studios, appendTo, and then went on to launch her own business providing marketing consulting to tech startups.
Ellie lives in her hometown of Fort Worth and serves as a member of the Advisory Board for the Digital Marketing Certification Program at Texas A&M Texarkana. She has previously served on the Boards of Directors for Women Communicators of Austin and Together Digital.
Job Titles:
- Senior Content Strategist
Job Titles:
- Senior Content Strategist
Job Titles:
- Director of Strategy
- Director of Strategy / Monterey, CA
Greg Dunlap got his start in Drupal in 2006 at a Lullabot onsite training for his employer at the time, the Seattle Times Company. Feeling an instant kinship with Lullabot Jeff Eaton, Greg accepted Eaton's encouragement to contribute and today leads one of the eight core initiatives for Drupal 8. The so-called CMI initiative endeavors to consolidate Drupal's scattered site data, views, content types, and module settings, to a unified, secure API. The new system, which shipped as part of Drupal 8, makes deploying, testing, and reusing Drupal site configuration more consistent and easier to manage.
Greg graduated from college in 1991 having majored in photojournalism and fine art photography. With the US in a deep recession and the future of publishing already on the verge of disruption, Greg was first to volunteer when his boss, the owner of a Chicago Real Estate newspaper, asked if anyone wanted to help move the paper's database from Paradox for Dos to Paradox for Windows. He's been in the software business ever since.
Greg is also a world-class pinball player and has been participating in pinball tournaments for nearly 25 years. For some of his career he managed to marry his fascination with the game with his software engineering work, writing C++ code to run various games.
His Drupal resume has included stints with leading Drupal agencies Palantir and NodeOne, and his body of work includes work for Foreign Affairs magazine, Ikea and the Swedish Government. He authored Deploy module and was a long time maintainer of the Services module. He is also co-author of Packt's "Drupal 7 Module Development."
Job Titles:
- Technical Account Executive
Job Titles:
- Senior JavaScript Developer
Job Titles:
- Director of Product, Tugboat
- Director of Product, Tugboat / Atlanta, Georgia
Like many in the web development world, James came to programming through the side door. After graduating with a degree in music performance, he decided in 2004 to start a record label and began searching for tools to help him build websites for the bands he was working with. A recommendation from a fellow nerd landed him on the Drupal homepage. Drupal 4.5 was the current release at the time, and while he got a lot for free from the community, he soon found that he had quite a bit to learn in order to be able to build the simple yet unique websites his musicians wanted.
James took to web development quickly. As his skills increased and interest grew, he began learning other technologies, and built one of the first decoupled Drupal websites using a Drupal 5 backend that fed XML to a Flash frontend website. It wasn't long before James realized that he was receiving more compliments on the websites he was building than for the music, and so he hung up his record label hat and pursued a full time career in web development.
After working as the Drupal developer for Sprocket, a web design agency based in metro Atlanta, he was hired as a part-time Drupal trainer for Lullabot, then as a developer, senior developer, and then architect-all for some of the world's biggest brands. James has worked on large data migrations for The Recording Academy, engaging editorial experiences for MSNBC, and helped create a fast and stable development and deployment process for Cisco's Support Forum. He architected a decoupled user experience for Martha Stewart, and a continuous integration and deployment process for Intel, which later became Tugboat.
Job Titles:
- Developer
- Developer / North Canton, OH
Jason Blanda is a front-end developer who has been developing websites since 2010 and has been involved with Drupal since 2013. He enjoys learning and passing on what he has learned, and in 2017 he authored Drupal 8 for Beginners.
Throughout his career, he has worked with a wide range of technologies, aligning them to create successful experiences. He helped drastically improve the accessibility of a utility company's website, and he helped launch a decoupled Drupal implementation for a San Francisco school district using Knockout.js.
Jason lives in North Canton, OH with his wife. In his free time, he studies Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and you can find him on Twitch doing Super Mario World speedruns.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Design Director
- Graphic Designer
- Associate Design Director / Buffalo, NY
Jen Witkowski started her career as a graphic designer but fell in love with web design after working on a small in-house website back in 2003. She's now a Senior Interactive/UX designer with over ten years of experience. Jen loves creative problem solving and the creative research process. She always takes an opportunity to learn something new - from JavaScript at work to installing a new window at home.
Jen has experience working on everything from mobile apps to websites, including some branding and print work. She's used that experience at Lullabot working with such clients as MSNBC, This Old House, the NYU School of Medicine, IBM, Carnegie Mellon University, and Ames Laboratory. Her work has ranged from creating intuitive user experiences for intricate, data-dense apps to designing navigational solutions for complex website hierarchies.
At Lullabot, she was a lead designer of Olivero - the new default theme for Drupal 9 and helped Iowa State University create an intuitive user experience for an app that helps landowners understand the benefits and costs of planting prairies and trees on their land. She also worked with the NYU School of Medicine to design a navigational solution that simplified the user experience of a complex hierarchy.
Her passion for design drove Jen to earn a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Computer Art from the Rochester Institute of Technology. She's an active teacher and mentor in the design community, having leveraged her experience to teach several workshops and serving as an adjunct professor at a local college teaching web & graphic design.
In her free time, Jen enjoys gardening, sailing, cooking, and spending time outdoors. You can often find her enjoying a good book on her patio on a sunny day. Jen and her rescue dog, Oreo, live in Buffalo, NY.
Job Titles:
- Accounting Assistant
- Accounting Assistant / Round Lake Beach, IL
Jordan is an accounting professional with a strong foundation in financial management. With over five years of experience, Jordan has become a master of analyzing, compiling, and reconciling financial data, including payroll processing.
Before joining the accounting world, Jordan was a certified nursing and chiropractic assistant. But, as someone who is most logical, she found her niche in research, documentation, and organization. Jordan received her VITA/TCE certification from the IRS and has become a Certified Bookkeeper through Harper College.
Prior to joining Lullabot, Jordan honed her skills at Club Colors, a full-service brand management and business solutions company. While at Club Colors, she was recognized with the Level Up Award and was selected by senior management and her peers to attend the 2023 President's Club in Cabo. Jordan is a dedicated lifetime learner and will soon graduate with honors from Harper College with an Associate Degree in Accounting.
Jordan lives in the Chicagoland area with her husband and ragdoll cat. She looks forward to the short spurts of nice weather so she can tend her flower garden while listening to audiobooks or hanging lakeside while her husband goes fishing.
Jordan is an avid collector of many things and has been working on an inherited vinyl record collection for the past few years. Interested in all music genres, her collection is currently at 523 records!
Job Titles:
- COO
- COO and Chairperson
- Drupal Contributor
Karen has been a Drupal contributor since 2006. She was a co-maintainer of the Content Construction Kit (CCK), the author of the Date and Calendar modules, as well as the author or maintainer of 40+ other Drupal modules like Schema.org Metatag. The Content Construction Kit, a fundamental Drupal system that allows users to create any number of content types and populate them with custom fields, was added to Drupal Core in Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. The Date module was added to Drupal core in Drupal 8.
Karen has been actively involved in web development since the early days of the web. She created ElderWeb in 1994 as one of the very first healthcare sites on the web and has created numerous personal sites, including a personal blog site that is currently focused on finance and the economy.
At Lullabot, Karen serves as the COO, a role in which she oversees finance, HR, Lullabot's internal infrastructure, and the company's ESOP. Karen also serves as Chairperson of our Board of Directors.
Job Titles:
- Senior Front - End Developer
Job Titles:
- Director of Human Resources & Administration
Job Titles:
- Technical Project Manager
Job Titles:
- Technical Project Manager
Job Titles:
- Content Writer & Strategist
Job Titles:
- Senior Technical Architect
Job Titles:
- Senior Development Manager