Our People

Denise Paolucci (the Suit) began working on the LiveJournal.com project in 2001. Since then, she's done everything from customer service to product planning to documentation to user advocacy to QA testing to falling over exhausted because she's trying to do too much at once. She left LiveJournal in 2007 to pursue a career in writing. She hopes that with Dreamwidth Studios, she'll be able to use her experience to create a place where creative people of all types will find a home for their expression where they feel safe, welcomed, and supported.

Denise lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with her long-suffering wife, who fortunately enjoys the frequent "c'mere, look, isn't this cool?" invocations, and three cats, who don't care about the internet as long as they get fed on time.

Official journals: denise and dw_biz

Mark Smith (the Geek) began volunteering with LiveJournal.com in 2001 in technical support and code development. He joined the staff in 2004, where he contributed heavily to all areas of the site and worked on utilities such as Perlbal and MogileFS that are now used by many other web sites. After transitioning to Six Apart, Mark worked to design and build out the systems infrastructure for the Vox.com product launch.

Since those days, Mark has been a MySQL DBA, managed an operations team, and maintained a cadre of open source projects of his own while working for companies such as Google, Mozilla, and Bump.

He currently resides near San Francisco, CA with his partner, Ari, and their two small sons. In his free time, he enjoys motorcycles, tabletop and LARP gaming, and amateur radio (license KC8BCW).

Official journals: mark and dw_dev

Afuna first learned Perl as part of the Support team on LiveJournal. There, she picked up a love of digging through code and diagnosing the freaky stuff. She bounces from one interesting thing to another, and was hired as Dreamwidth's first employee because she can do a little bit of everything -- and do it well!

Fu lives in the Philippines, and has dreams of traveling the world one day. When she remembers there's a world outside work and the internet (which is rarely), she hits the gym and kicks stuff around. In her spare time, she hangs out in IRC with The Awesomest Ex-Boyfriend, knits, does calligraphy, and tries not to get pulled in too many directions at once.

Official journal: fu

MissKat heads up the Dreamwidth Support team. She specializes in facilitating user/developer interactions, but enjoys just about everything Dreamwidth can throw at her. She was sucked into Support shortly before Open Beta in 2009 after spending way too much time on IRC. She wasn't even supposed to BE here today!

In her spare time, Kat enjoys recreating history with the Society for Creative Anachronism, cooking tasty foods, napping, and playing "where did you stash mommy's socks?" with her ferrets, Hermes Horatio and Isaac.

Official journals: misskat and dw_support

Alierak is Dreamwidth's backup sysadmin on call, helping Mark wrangle servers and keeping an eye out for problems. He has approximately two decades of experience with Unix systems and open source, resulting in ninja-like reflexes for troubleshooting and bug hunting. He became disillusioned familiar with the LiveJournal codebase in 2006 when Brad announced a cross-site scripting contest offering permanent accounts for reporting security bugs (Alierak won three and maintains a healthy mistrust of our HTML cleaner).

He is also a sysadmin at a major university, husband and father of two, and enjoys building or fixing things, cooking, and playing with math. He can often be found singing or playing various instruments in church.

Official journal: alierak

Azurelunatic came into the LiveJournal volunteer IRC channel during one of the early data center "power events" to find out what was going on. Denise obtained another minion shortly thereafter. Azz specializes in thoughtful analysis of any social media system she immerses herself in, and enjoys finding the root needs underlying any request for more bells and whistles, and thinking up a way to fulfil that need that fits in with the site's gestalt and actually could be implemented. She was in IRC not looking busy enough when Denise and Mark needed a team leader for spam, and now enjoys squashing spammers.

By day, Azz is a mild-mannered minion in the cloudy part of Silicon Valley (and lives in the foggy part of the Bay Area). She dreamed of becoming a Communications Officer like Lt. Uhura when she was a child; now she spends most of her commute using a suspiciously similar headset. Her hobbies include talking to Kat, crocheting, IRC, and having bizarre, one-sided conversations with the characters in her current draft novel.

Official journal: dw_antispam

ChemicalLace is ⅓ of the Dreamwidth Support Triumvirate. She volunteered for LiveJournal Support and Abuse teams from 2001-2003, where she met Mark and Denise, and followed them to Dreamwidth during closed beta testing.

In the real world, ChemicalLace is a researcher who spends most of her time in the lab. During her rare trips home and outside, she enjoys cooking, eating, reading, biking, scuba diving, and spending time with her cat.

Official journal: dw_support

DomTheKnight is leading the user acceptance testing team for Dreamwidth and is ⅓ of the Support Triumvirate. At her day job in research administration, she has worked on database conversions, and currently manages data in several databases and trains her colleagues to use them.

In her free time, Dom enjoys singing in choirs, reading all the books she can afford, crocheting afghans, and playing bridge. She has recently become obsessed with knitting socks. She is a lifelong fan of Northwestern University sports in all shapes and sizes, and knows way too much trivia about the 'Cats.

Official journals: dw_beta and dw_support

Jennifer Griffin does Terms of Service enforcement because Mark asked her to, and submits tons of Bugzilla patches because it's fun. An MIT graduate, she has been on the internet since before the invention of this newfangled "World Wide Web" thing. She runs the MU* where Mark & Janine met, which lets her claim indirect partial responsibility for the existence of Dreamwidth. You're welcome.

Jen is passionate about computers, communities, crafts, all varieties of music, speculative fiction, space exploration... basically the whole damn universe. She grew up and currently lives in the reddest of the red states, but also spent 12 years residing in the bluest of the blue states, so she is used to navigating ideological extremes. After spending several years working as top-tier IT support in a non-profit organization, she changed gears and is now a full-time mom to two precious, precocious children.

Official journal: dw_tos

Audra Johnson (the Information Architect) has insatiable needs to collate and organize information of all kinds, mostly manifesting in the site wiki and rallying everyone to make sure things are properly documented and categorized. If you ask her where someone put something, she can tell you in three seconds or less ... unless you mean her keys. This leaves her in an excellent position to assist new contributors. She also does development work, back to front and in between.

Audra lives in Seattle, WA, where she works as a bioinformatics software engineer, which involves sifting through massive amounts of data using code and math for biology research.

Official journals: dw_wiki and dw_styles

Andrea Nall has been working on the Dreamwidth project since inception. Her area of specialty is the importer, which will allow anyone to migrate their journal from any other LiveJournal-based site. You can ask her where practically anything in the codebase is hiding and she'll know where to look to find the answer. Her other interests, besides writing pages of Perl code, include writing pages of code in other various languges, technical theatre, game development, and breaking (and hopefully fixing) stuff in fun and obscure ways.

Dre lives near Lakewood, Colorado, and is currently being enslaved by that evil thing called "college". In her spare time ... what spare time? Between staring at pages of code for hours on end and school? If only she didn't have to sleep.

Pau Amma has been volunteering for LiveJournal since early 2005 and for Dreamwidth since it was just a bunch of mailing lists. He has held jobs in programming, networks, operations, resume database wrangling, technical support, and office gophering.

His interests include writing code and documentation for Dreamwidth, not setting cats on fire, learning Tagalog, light reading, listening to classical music, making too many puns, drinking preposterous amounts of coffee, and looking for a day job. He's a permanent resident of There, and thinks The Awesomest Ex-Girlfriend is still an Awesomest Trusted Friend and Advisor.

His alignment shifts randomly between Useful Evil, Chaotic Punny, and Ergative Absolutive.

Deborah co-leads the accessibility team. She spends her time writing accessibility improvements for the Dreamwidth code, as well as educating the other developers and designers about accessibility. In her other life she works in library technology, where she's gained a reputation as That Person Who Will Glare at You If Your Library Software Isn't Accessible.

Official journal: dw_accessibility

Ricky Buchanan continues her fight for an internet she can actually use by leading the accessibility team on Dreamwidth. She is a leading blogger on the topic of assistive technology, especially in regards to Apple products, and a staunch advocate for accessibility and disability awareness. Ricky also runs ATMac, a site about accessibility for Apple's products, iTalkMagazine and No Pity City in her copious free time.

Official journal: dw_accessibility

Sarah serves as Dreamwidth's executive assistant, which involves much filing of paperwork and weekly trips to the credit union. Yes, she will get you coffee, but only if she's already getting some for herself. And if you drink it full-octane. And if she can find a second clean mug.

Sarah's superpowers include paying the bills on time, keeping the taxman from battering down the door, and keeping the pantry she shares with Denise well-stocked with Diet Coke with Lime.