Team
John Florez
After graduating in 1995 with a B.A in Psychology from Binghamton University, John went to work on Wall Street. Two years after becoming a licensed Broker, John landed the role of Managing Partner at First New York Financial Holdings. In 1998 he moved to San Francisco, and founded The Florez Group, a technology staffing firm.
In January of 2009 John was introduced to the world of Drupal. Shortly thereafter, Drupal Connect was born; a full service Drupal firm that provides Drupal development, training, and staffing services all across North America.
John brings to the business a creative, entrepreneurial process that has been refined over the years. He also believes in exercising the highest level of ethics to ensure that his clients best interests are always paramount.
Some of John’s other passions include spending time with his wife Karen and his two dogs Sonny and Franklin, tennis, eating at Lombardi's Pizza and Spark's Steak house, and watching gangster films. He was born in Colombia, SA and now splits his time between Manhattan's Upper West Side and Newport, RI.
Karen Sironen
As COO, Karen oversees the day-to-day operations across all divisions of Drupal Connect, including recruiting and client management. She began her technical recruiting career with The Florez Group and quickly became a top billing recruiter. Through her tenure at The Florez Group, she gained many well-respected clients and candidates in the Drupal space.
Steve Edwards
Steve Edwards has been involved in the IT industry since 1995. His range of experience includes varied roles in the banking software, trucking, and telecom industries. Among these roles are support, analyst, and project manager, and projects serving some of the largest banking corporations in the country. Steve learned PHP shortly after starting to work on web sites in 1998, and has been a Drupal addict since discovering the CMS in 2006. Since then, he has created Drupal sites for businesses and non-profits, and is active in the Drupal community, with contributed modules and core patches.
Steve thoroughly enjoys creating sites that help people effectively manage their information to obtain the greatest benefit and attract traffic to the site. His experience as both a client-facing project manager and a developer give him a diverse skill set that allows him to function in multiple roles.
Steve holds a B.A. in Economics from Colorado College. When not working on Drupal, Steve's time is spent with his family and church. He is active in sports, and is a search and rescue volunteer.
Ryan Palmer
Ryan Palmer is a Drupal developer with over 5 years of experience developing highly customized web sites. He has been an active contributor to the Drupal project since 2007 and is active in the Montreal Drupal community, recently acting as Treasurer for DrupalCamp Montreal 2009 and 2010. Ryan attended his third DrupalCon in a row in San Francisco in April 2010.
Ryan is an avid Crossfitter and enjoys recreational cycling, having completed a 1-day, 284km (176 mi) ride across Prince Edward Island in August 2009. He also loves to travel, having visited roughly 11 countries on 5 continents in the past 2 1/2 years.
Ryan was the Technical Reviewer for the Drupal Panels Cookbook, released in August 2010 by Packt Publishing.
Eric Lawrence
Eric Lawrence is a designer/developer based in Omaha who loves working with Drupal. Driven by the challenge of solving problems, he is passionate about building well-crafted products for others to use and finds Drupal an excellent vehicle to do just that. Eric has over 11 years of experience building web sites and and has been working with and theming Drupal sites since 2006.
Eric holds a Bachelors of Fine Art from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln where he first began working with web sites and web-based applications. With a professional background anchored in design, his unique blend of both design and development has helped him play the role of technological innovator for several design-focused agencies.
Casey Grzecka
Casey Grzecka is focused on helping business processes by deploying smart and effective web technologies. He develops intelligent content management systems that create flexible user interaction and provides timely response to ever-changing market needs.
Casey has long ago abandoned web site design in favor of developing web site applications. The key ingredients to enhanced user interaction are core technologies he uses. From Drupal as a content management system, jQuery as an interface control layer, to PHP, CSS, Flex, Flash, XML and AJAX as tools of choice, he creates web applications that aid your company's success and reinforce leading position in the market place.
Casey is a team player that loves to be a part of something bigger. He thrives on interacting with open source software communities and enjoys working with tight knit development teams to build complex immersive applications.
Robbie Jackson
Robert Jackson came to Drupal the right way, through Linux systems administration and the Open Source community back in the mid-90's.
Creativity is his middle name and Drupal is the medium.
Jessica Marland
Jessica is in charge of Drupal Connect's direct marketing, business development, and recruiting. Jessica may be the only technical recruiter who specializes in just Drupal! If you have a Drupal opening or looking for Drupal work, Jess is the one to talk to. She lives in Warwick, RI and holds a B.A in marketing from The University of Rhode Island. When Jessica is not working, you can find her playing soccer, singing karaoke, and enjoying life with family and friends.
Brett Fielo
Brett Fielo is a project manager with over 15 years of experience in technology consulting, development and project management. Brett began his technology career as a consultant for a firm that specialized in document management solutions for large law, accounting and fortune 500 companies. He later joined CNET, where he worked in the New Jersey technology office writing and managing internal documentation, document repositories and intranet sites. While at CNET, Brett applied for and received a patent with two co-workers for integrating support documentation inline with web-based applications. Upon leaving CNET, he joined a startup founded by a former CNET alum, working with such companies as NBC and Vignette, and then went on to manage the web development team at a highly regarded New Jersey design and marketing agency.
Before beginning his career in technology, Brett obtained his law degree from Seton Hall University. He specialized in contract and matrimonial law.
When not at work, Brett enjoys spending time with his wife Susan and their daughters Hannah and Jessica.
Christopher Jones
Christopher Jones has been developing sites in Drupal since 2006. He has built sites ranging in purpose and complexity, including e-commerce, online learning, social networking, and academic sites. His focus is on information architecture, third party integration and content aggregation, and developing asynchronous UIs. Christopher attended DrupalCon DC, and regularly attends local Drupal camps and PHP meet-ups.
Christopher is the father of two children, one profoundly deaf, and is deeply involved in the Deaf community in Philadelphia. He is educated in Philosophy and enjoys science fiction and sailing. His private dream is to build a boat in his basement.
Jonathon Whitener
Jonathon has over six years experience developing PHP/MySQL application on Linux-based platforms and has studied computer science for over 12 years. He's been working with Drupal since the 5.1 release and has done over 100+ sites on the Drupal platform, four of which were for Fortune 500 companies. Jonathon is avid about creating efficient Drupal modules, and making Drupal scale out to millions of pageviews per day (reverse proxy caches, memcache, APC). He's our guy if you are interested in integrating Drupal and 3rd party authentication and/or APIs (REST/XMLRPC). He is also passionate about great design and UX, and all the fun that you can do with Ajax.
When he's not Drupaling, Jonathon spends his time with his wife and puppy in Austin, TX. You will probably be able to find him playing some sort of FPS on X-Box Live, but you won't be able to kill him.
Chris Akeley
Chris Akeley is a technical architect and programmer. Based in greater Boston, he has been programming and consulting for 15 years. Recently he has served in a senior capacity on 2 large scale Drupal implementations, Bentley University and weei.com. He has created numerous custom modules, primarily to integrate with third-party systems via XML and APIs. He has significant experience developing permission sets and workflows for a complex user base, as well we in scaling high-availability Drupal sites. In addition to his technical skills, he is adept with Agile project management and has domain expertise in higher education, association and event management, trade show technologies, and e-commerce. He also happens to be a lawyer.
When not Drupaling, Chris likes to spend time with his family, play various stringed instruments, and bicycle.
Tim Loudon
- Professional Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Javascript/jQuery, XHTML, CSS skills
- 5+ years of LAMP development experience, 2+ years of Drupal experience
- Significant experience with custom modules and theming
- System/database administration experience LAMP (with memcached and APC) and .NET stacks
- Former Fortune 100 consultant/analyst with well-rounded business understanding
Arron Ellison
- Two years of Drupal theming Experience.
- Some experience theming Wordpress.
- Proficient in altering Drupal's mark-up and output using custom template files and preprocess functions.
- Proficient with plain javascript, jQuery, and PHP.
- Proficient in hand coding standards compliant. semantically correct HTML / CSS.
- Capable of basic LAMP server administration.
- Experience using SVN.
- Knowledge of standards for 508 compliance.
- Competent with Photoshop and Fireworks.
- Knowledgeable and enthusiastic about HTML 5 and CSS 3.
John W. Johnson
- 9 years development experience, 4 years with Drupal
- Specializing in legacy database integration
- Back-end, SQL, and third-party API specialist
Stuart D. Johnson
- Drupal Developer with > 2 Years of experience in User Interface Development
- Expert with CSS and cross-browser difficulties, including IE6-8, Safari, Opera, Firefox, etc...
- Experience working with very tight design requirements, and working with output from other Developers