Ian McFarland

I'm VP of Technology at Pivotal Labs, and a principal there. I speak at a lot of tech and design conferences about some of the subtler points of development, the importance of integrated teams, and the people side of building software. I has a habit of spotting trends early: I started doing Java at Java 1.0a2 (when Java, instead of Ruby, was the slow language that wouldn't scale.) I was employee no. 4 at Friendster and ran technology there for a year, back when that was cool, and you couldn't by compute cycles on demand. Before that, I was on the launch team at Hotwired, where a few of us 'invented' the banner ad, for which I'm sorry, but which after all made all our web-space jobs possible. And I started developing worldwide distributed hypertext systems with Ted Nelson way back in 1989. If only Tim Berners-Lee had heard about the work, and not invented something simpler and (mostly) more elegant...