Thanks to all of you that applied for this year’s Ajax Experience scholarship; choosing the winners from such an interesting and diverse pool of applicants was pretty difficult. While we didn’t plan it this way, we wound up selecting one candidate each from the general category of applicants we received (e.g., a college student, a recent grad working for his university, a corporate developer doing IT in a non-IT shop, a former corporate developer who just took the independent plunge, and a developer working for a poor non-profit for a good cause). The winners are:
Matthew Batchelder
Matthew Batchelder runs BorkWeb ( http://borkweb.com), is a co-founder of MasterWish (http://masterwish.com), and is a web application developer at a university in New Hampshire. Matthew’s been very successful at incorporating Ajax in his work applications (”Users have been pleased with the results and want more!”), and in after-hours projects. Being a public school, Matthew’s employer doesn’t have the budget to send him to conferences.
Angel Municio
Angel Municio is an independent software developer who in the middle of May this year and after working for more than 10 years as a developer, decided to quit his day job to start working on his own project. “Working on the week-ends or after hours was not an option for me since I have two kids and they demand ‘daddy time’. Since my wife works full time and we had some savings, we decided to take a shot and implement it.”
Jonathon Whitener
Jonathon Whitener is the web developer for an early education non-profit organization headquartered in Boston, MA. He uses Ajax to “provide better reporting functionality, and more intuitive input interfaces. This is helping us better utilize the data we collect and measure the effectiveness of our program, which in turn directly corresponds to the quality of education a child receives.” Jonathon’s employer “simply does not have the budget necessary for conferences if this kind.”
Ian Gaenssley
Ian Gaenssley works for a largish corporation that isn’t in the software dev business and doesn’t pay for developer education (sound familiar?). He started in the help desk trenches, and “after all the glitz and glamor of that wore off, I began working on developing our first knowledge base. I taught myself ASP, Javascript, SQL… and upped our service levels to new heights not seen since Arnold on Different Strokes was given those ’special brownies’ from the Gouch.” With the emergence of the Ajax movement, he’s started improving his application with all kinds of Ajaxian goodness, and wants to take it to the next level.
Ed McManus
Ed McManus is an undergraduate student and “avid online UI developer. I’ve been reading Ajaxian for some time and have been a working member of the industry for several years; however, I am still a poor college student and do not have the means to pay the full registration fees for the conference.” Ed’s also “a co-founder of a social networking start-up in Cambridge (visit scilink.com for more info and our blog).”