Meghann Millard started hacking Geocities pages at age 15, and hasn’t been able to escape the Internet's clutches ever since.
Her professional life kicked off in the badlands of the Canadian music industry, where she quickly amassed experience during
stints as publicist, promoter, and artist manager. Upon encountering a freshly-minted development firm — and observing that
web consultancies functioned like bands — she began deftly applying her hard-earned hat collection to the tech realm by managing
finance, operations, sales, community facilitation and marketing responsibilities for Unspace.
A master facilitator, Meghann thrives when inventing environments and scenarios where people can tap into their reserves of
creativity, allowing them to connect and collaborate more deeply with one another. Recent examples include the seminal
RubyFringe and FutureRuby conferences,
Changecamp, the Ruby Job Fair and the Technologic
speaker series. In her spare time, she does the same thing: consulting NPOs on how to better utilize existing technologies, as well
as creating a wellspring of benefits and fundraising initiatives. She's a bookworm and writer who enjoys carefully planning her travel
journeys and record purchases.
Mike McCann is a recovering entertainment industry professional with more than 15 years experience planning, executing and managing numerous creative multimedia properties across several verticals, both online and in the wireless space. Mike created and oversaw Yahoo! Canada's media and entertainment properties at the height of the portal wars, and also built and managed the content in Canada's #2 digital music store for Telus (we all know who #1 is). He's as comfortable creating use cases and product roadmaps or overseeing rigorous QA as he is making boardroom pitches to clients and managing ongoing outward-facing relationships. In his spare (ha!) time, he's a DJ and general music nerd of the highest order, a devoted Vancouver Canucks fan and an obscenely proud dad to his three-year-old son Riley.
Jamie Gilgen loves to write code and has been doing so professionally for the past 8 years. After completing a degree in Computer Engineering she spent five years at IBM working on various teams under the DB2 umbrella. Realizing that there were exciting things happening in the world, she decided to explore and found herself at Unspace where she tries to bring order to the universe. Jamie is passionate about learning and recently completed a second degree in Chemistry. While working on this degree she developed fauxflash to try to make memorization of information a little easier. In her spare time she loves to race cyclocross and play violin.
Carsten Nielsen's working life began in a metal fabrication shop, apprenticing to be a weldor-fitter while moonlighting on web projects. He parlayed the hobby into a fulfilling career, and as Unspace's resident software maker he enjoys getting his hands on everything from UX design to systems administration. Lately he's been hard at work on Stepmix; it aims to be a killer product for record labels and music producers to distribute and sell their digital audio content. He's also known for his LCBO API project, it had mobile developers writing LCBO apps years before anything official hit the scene. Like Jamie, Carsten is also an avid cyclist; he's our resident token fixed-gear ridin' hipster. He's a music lover, and connoisseur/fabricator of tasty drinks and foodthings.
Justin Giancola started programming professionally shortly after vowing he would never write software under any circumstances. He spent his formative programming years building backend systems for FreshBooks and pursuing his clandestine relationship with Lisp. Not content with sleeping adequately Justin co-founded Guestlist which he continues to actively develop to this day. Justin works most effectively on projects where he can help to make systems more simple, more correct and more reliable. Justin has a penchant for antique motorcycles, and despite his best efforts has made no headway in curbing his habit for acquiring esoteric programming languages.
Jorge Villalobos is passionate about the way people interact with the world. He designs interfaces with a focus on usability, accessibility, efficiency and overall human interaction. He believes a beautiful interface is that which is invisible, and doesn't get in the way of the user and what he or she wants to accomplish. With over six years of experience on front-end coding, and three years on back-end development, Jorge is comfortable prototyping and implementing his ideas.
Shawn Allison designs and implements front-end code for web applications. A major proponent of the popular Haml and Sass markup languages, he believes both visual design and the code behind it should be beautiful. Working with Unspace for over 5 years, he's contributed to many of their major projects including Canadian Tire, CommunityLend and The Score Mobile iPhone Edition.
Eric Taylor is enamoured with ideas. Sharing them and actualizing them is what he is all about. This keeps him involved with a couple projects at a time. In fact, he's spent most of his life mucking about in arts and media. Presently he's been keeping his hands dirty as the Unspace office manager roustabout. He also produces a multiple award winning web series called Out With Dad. In his spare time he makes up stories and shamelessly brags about his polyamourous book affairs.
Pete founded Unspace in 2004 with two friends after too many years building complex systems for the financial industry. The goal was simple: work hard on interesting projects with smart people without sacrificing happiness or dignity. Unspace also marked Pete's transition from proprietary Microsoft development to becoming one of the first adopters of Ruby on Rails. He was the curator of the RubyFringe and FutureRuby conferences, and hosts the popular monthly “Rails Pub Nite” developer event — of which there has been over 50 to date. An avid traveler and occasional touring rock drummer, Pete is passionate about music and film photography. He recently co-founded BuzzData, a data publishing and collaboration hub.