First, the new faces:

Al Steffen joined us about a year ago, but never had the opportunity to travel to any of the Drupal events outside of the greater Denver area. In fact, I just learned today, he hasn't even seen a proper ocean. Some may know Al online as Zarabadoo, the handle he uses on IRC and Drupal.org. He's the man behind the nicely semantic Hunchbaque theme (ugly on the outside, beautiful on the inside).

John Fiala (jcfiala) joined us last summer not knowing anything about Drupal, and now he's one of our power developers, with a particular affection for databases. He's already made a mark in the Drupal community with contributions such as the Drupal Markup Engine, not to mention helping with the upgrade of nodequeue to Drupal 6. That's not all: one of our favorite in-house modules, Node Carousel, was developed by John, along with....

Greg Hines, who also will be a first-timer at a DrupalCon. Greg joined us just a few months ago by way of Ars Technica, which already is very cool, and now has become a key player in coding and theming, with a bit of JavaScript thrown in for good measure. (Greg is one of those guys who just "gets" things quickly.)

(Greg, John and Al all knew each other before, being on the organizing staff of Nan Desu Kan, the huge annual anime convention held in Denver every summer.)

Andy Lasda joined pingVision back in May of last year, but only now was he able to break away from family and bike cruises to attend a DrupalCon. Andy's interest in computers began at the tender age of 9, programming BASIC on an Apple II, and his love for technology has only grown. Now with over a dozen years' professional experience in systems administration, web development and application development in PHP and Perl -- not to mention business analysis and project management. As pingVision's first-string sysadmin and developer, Andy's keyboard has touched, checked out, pushed or created just about every file on every one of our projects.

Ben Jeavons is the most recent addition to the pingVision family. Ben learned his Drupal chops at the Boulder-based Drupal-powered venture Enthusiast Group, and has already become a project lead.

Those who attended DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 may have already met some of our other folks:

Matthew Saunders is our operations manager. In some ways he comes from years and years of experience in an entirely different world: non-profits. Matthew joined us already having a solid knowledge of Drupal. If you've read his blog or the TechSoup forums, you'll know him as something of Drupal evangelist as well.

Kevin Bridges (cyberswat) has become our lead developer on our largest projects of late. Kevin maintains the Picasa and Auto Assign Role modules. He's also been involved in our ongoing project management development quest. Be sure not to miss our case study presentation on PopSci.com. Kevin will be doing much of the talking there.

Rad (whose full name is Radovan Anzulovic) is a trained mechanical engineer who's one of our themers. His good cheer would almost be maudlin, except that it's really honest good cheer. He's also an adventurist, especially when it comes to bicycles. If you meet him, ask him about the schoolbus.

A returnee to worldwide Drupal events is Ezra Barnett Gildesgame (ezra-g), who was a presenter at OSCMS 2007. Ezra joined pingVision in January 2007 December 2006 as an intern who rapidly worked his way into a fearless developer who refuses to be stymied by any challenge. He maintains the Subgroups for Organic Groups module.

(You will no doubt also see a lot of our friend, developer emeritus and Permanent Member of the Drupal Association, Greg Knaddison (greggles), who has returned from adventures in South America to engage fully in his own growing ventures.)

Last, but certainly not least, is pingVision co-founder Katherine Lawrence. When pingVision evolved from a freelance shingle into an LLC, Kate and I comprised the entire company. Our first "office" was the livingroom of a 2-bedroom apartment, "financed" (if you could call it that) by our first client check. Much of what pingVision is today is thanks to Kate's hard-earned Fortune50 executive experience (which has often provided us both much lore on how not to do things) and unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom. On this trip, Kate revisits her former hometown of Boston for her first DrupalCon.

I'll be there, too, participating on the Communication/Cooperation/Collaboration panel, a panel on "getting your team up to speed on Drupal", and in our PopSci presentation, as well as our session Drupal in the Real World.

By the by, we're still hiring. Find us at the job fair! Please stop by and say hello!