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 two cats, who don't care about the internet as long as they get fed on time.

Official journal: denise

Official community: 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, concentrating both on feature development and backend development, where he contributed heavily to utilities, such as Perlbal and MogileFS, that are in wide use by many other sites. After transitioning to Six Apart, Mark worked to design and build out the systems infrastructure for the Vox.com product launch. In 2007, he moved to Iceland to program for CCP Games' EVE Online, before moving back to the US in early 2008 as a Senior Systems Administrator for the Mozilla Corporation.

Mark currently resides near San Francisco, CA with his wife Janine and their canine companions. From time to time, he can be heard on the air as KC8BCW, typically on the local 2M repeaters. 73s!

Official journal: mark

Official community: dw_dev

Afuna first learned Perl from looking at the LiveJournal code (for fun), which ended in her volunteering as part of the Support team from 2007 to 2008. 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 Boyfriend and tries not to get pulled in too many directions at once.

Official journal: fu

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.

Azz lives in the foggy part of the San Francisco Bay Area. She dreamed of becoming a Communications Officer like Lt. Uhura when she was a child; now she spends much of her free time on IRC, on the phone with Kat, and having bizarre, one-sided conversations with the characters in her current draft novel.

Official community: 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 science graduate student 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 community: dw_support

John Chodan joined up with Dreamwidth early in 2009 as a beta tester, but then started getting involved in more and more other things (including the occasional patch). Right now he heads up the Anti-Spam team and supports the volunteer Wiki, training other volunteers in both areas. His previous experience includes business and consumer technical support and administrating a card game service.

John is a full-time student (studying Business while preparing for law school) and a full-time husband and parent to two wonderful young girls. When not meeting the demands of his ladies he enjoys renaissance dance, building custom computers, photography, and cooking (and eating!).

Official community: dw_antispam

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 communities: 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 community: dw_tos

Audra Johnson (the Information Architect) joined Dreamwidth because she's passionate about online community and user experiences, as evidenced by her work running the LJ community no_lj_ads. As Mistress of Project Organization, she has insatiable needs to collate and organize information of all kinds, mostly manifesting in the site wiki and stalking 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.

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 community: dw_wiki

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, in support, translation, documentation, and occasionally coding. 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, looking for a day job, and hanging out on IRC with The Awesomest Girlfriend. He's a permanent resident of There. His alignment shifts randomly between Useful Evil, Chaotic Punny, and Ergative Absolutive.

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 community: 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.

Zarhooie , also known as Kat, is ⅓ of the Dreamwidth Support Triumvirate. She specializes in volunteer training and wears her Tact Hat with pride and tenacity (whatever that means). Kat got sucked into Support shortly before Open Beta in April of 2009 after spending way too much time on IRC. She wasn't even supposed to BE here today!

In her copious spare time (HA), Kat is a full-time college student majoring in Religion. When not baking, cooking, knitting, sewing, studying, reading or composing, Kat enjoys playing rugby, messing around in the Society for Creative Anachronism, wearing stompy boots and sometimes even napping.

Official community: dw_support