Ian McFarland

Ian started working with worldwide distributed Hypertext systems in 1989, working with Ted Nelson at Autodesk. He was on the launch team at HotWired, and was one of the 4 people who by circumstance would determine that banner ads would be 468x60. After HotWired, he founded Neo Communication, a consultancy working with companies like IDG and Sony. At Neo, he started doing Java development in 1995, developing the first client-server application ever built in Java, as part of the public launch of Java at SunWorld.

He was Java Evangelist at Symantec for VisualCafé, and was Sr. Director of Technology at HSX.com, before returning to consulting, and later writing Mastering Tomcat Development for J. Wiley and Sons. He joined Friendster in 2004 as employee #4, becoming Chief Architect as the company grew from 120,000 to 6,000,000 users, growing the physical plant from 4 machines to over 300 machines, and automating configuration and cluster management. Ian speaks frequently on the importance of Agile, Rails and the Cloud, both from a business and a technical perspective.