About Us
LessThanDot (LTD) is the creation of an experienced group of IT professionals, who spent time working in different environments, with different people. Being actively involved in the internet community has given them the inspiration to develop a free online community for anyone interested in IT to share information and ideas with each other and the resident experts to help develop shared knowledge.
The Owning Founders:
Andy Barnfather (HarleyQuinn) A software developer from the North East of England, mainly using VB6 and several flavours of SQL. He's one of the youngsters of the group at 26 and is currently working as a freelance consultant. In his spare time he plays lots of sports and also enjoys video games, live music and sunny afternoons spent in beer gardens.
Damian Bere (damber) Living in North Wales, UK and with a technical background in software development and various IT management positions, Damian currently works on strategic architecture projects for a large global company, particularly for systems integration and enterprise level solutions design. He is a geek at heart, and loves to experiment with all kinds of ideas and technology given the chance.
F. E. Boyle (Remou) At the moment I spend a good deal of time with MS Access. I have had a variety of jobs over the years, sometimes it helps.
Howard (Chopstik) Howard is a poli-sci grad who fell into technology because he was too lazy to do it either manually or for more than an hour at a time. He knows just enough to be dangerous with several MS-related technologies, including ASP, SQL and .NET technologies. He is happily married and lives in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US and enjoys a wide litany of subjects including (but not limited to) history (that he is not old enough to remember), politics (watching, not practicing), chess (Chinese and Western), technology (in its various forms), science (both natural and physical) and playing video games with his son (which is a normally friendly rivalry but can get heated on occasion).
Denis Gobo (SQLDenis) Denis has been working with SQL Server since version 6.5. Although he worked as an ASP/JSP/ColdFusion developer before the dot com bust, he has been working exclusively as a database developer/architect since 2002. In addition to English, Denis is also fluent in Croatian and Dutch, but he can curse in many other languages and dialects (just ask the SQL optimizer) He lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and three kids.
Ted Krueger (onpnt) Ted has been around a bit. Titles areas of development, engineering and recently the DBA side of things in the greater Chicago IL \ Milwaukee WI. At some point sonetring.net will be a place to call home but rate now it's taking up a nice chunk of space on some web server in some state. Remember, just listen to the professionals around you and you may be surprised on how fast you'll turn the tables and teach them something. I know nothing other than I need to learn something.
George Mastros (gmmastros) George has owned his own company for the last 10 years. His product is written in VB6 and uses a Microsoft SQL Server database. His hobbies include cooking and golf. He lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and daughter.
Christopher McCoy (kaht) Christopher graduated in 2002 from Western Illinois University with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. He lives in Illinois near St. Louis with his wife and 2 children. He likes to consider himself proficient in Javascript and HTML, but spends a lot of time working with SQL and ASP as well. Free time for Christopher usually involves playing video games, disc golf, guitar, or Magic: The Gathering.
Mark Smith (ca8msm) Mark is primarily an ASP.NET developer and also has skills in SQL Server, HTML and CSS. He is based in the North East of England and has recently become a father to a lovely little boy named George. Mark is the founder of aspnetlibrary and also has a blog.
Paul Theriault (ptheriault) Paul is a Sr. DBA in Rhode Island were he works for a National Insurance agency. He has spent the last 12 years as a DBA and has experience in MSSQL, Sybase, Oracle and AS400 for manufacturing and financial companies. Paul spends his spare time with his beautiful wife and 5 kids.
Alex Ullrich (AlexCuse)
Alex is a .NET and SQL Server developer from Southeastern PA. He's got a wonderful fiance of many years, and a veritable smorgasbord zoo of pets. He's also pursuing a Masters' degree in Software Engineering from Penn State. In what little time all this leaves he enjoys mountain biking, grilling, working on his crummy web page, and brewing beer. Oh, and drinking it too :D
Eli Weinstock-Herman (tarwn) Eli is a software developer, architect, and integrator for a Manufacturing company in South-east US. His skills range from web application development (with ASP.Net, ASP 3.0, or PHP) to database design (mostly on MSSQL) to manufacturing systems (Wonderware and PI) to a mixed bag of Systems Admin functions (SNMP monitoring, Virtual Servers, etc). He received his BS in CS and as part of a previous company, led the production and retail release of a couple manufacturing monitoring systems. More recently he has been involved in the design and integration of a multi-site MES following the ISA-95 standard. His other interests include Lean and it's application outside Manufacturing, his pets, computer games, and his wonderful wife.
Christiaan Baes (chrissie1) Christiaan is a forensic technician who programs on the side, although my function description says that I do IT-things for 90% of the time . I'm an avid VB.NET fan and I use lots of the ALT.Net techniques, like unit-testing, nhibernate, logging, IoC, ...
The Co-Founders:
Phil Hege (philhege)
Rick (ThatRickGuy)
Pete Eveleigh (foamcow)
Tahir Khalid (Kermit)
Cory Arthus (cLFlaVA)
Zameer Abdulla (ZmrAbdulla)
Mike (LNBruno)
Therese Perri (tperri)
genomon (genomon)
About the Group
But who are the people behind this group? The common thread amongst all of the LTD team is their passion for IT - in many different forms, and of course the sharing of this passion and experience with other like minded people. The combined experience of the founders is quite staggering, and is as diverse as you could imagine - from DBAs to developers, to hardware technicians, to support personnel, to analysts, project managers and architects. The founders are based all over the world, from the United Arab Emirates, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, the UK and the US, and are united by the powers of the inter-web tubes... :-)
A Brief History
So where did they all meet? The founders initially met in online forums and discussion groups, and gradually started to form a private group into which invitations eventually made their way to each of the members. Over a few years, this group became one of the most enjoyable places to discuss ideas, thoughts, problems, gripes and many other things that were important to the members. Unfortunately, other forums felt somewhat lacking in content, community spirit and functionality, and in the midst of frustrating quality of service from the private forum provider and with the ambition of creating a truly great community of IT people they decided to make it a reality - and build their own community.
Ethics and Ethos
It can be very hard to make everyone happy all of the time, and certainly the LTD team have found some of the IT communities to be lacking in some of the 'softer skills' in management as well as the technical functionality (and even content in some cases). To this end, we want to make LTD as open as is possible whilst still retaining a sensible order to things. Which means we want you to be a part of the community that drives LTD toward new goals and ensures that the way our community works is good for everyone within. There are many guidelines within LTD that are intended to help our users get the best out of the community, and there are one or two 'rules' too - we try to keep these to a minimum, but it's essential that we maintain the foundations of our principles. If you ever have any suggestions, simply post in our suggestions forum and we will try our best to make it a reality.
So really, LessThanDot is all about sharing - it is all about you, the community, helping each other and producing a quality environment to improve IT skills and knowledge for all those that wish to - including Students, Professionals, Bedroom Coders and more.
Other
For the last couple of years we have also done Meet&Greets. These are social gatherings for the fans of LTD. And we took pictures.