About Us
We have been in business since 1994, and have successfully delivered software systems to clients in all parts of the U.S. and Canada, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, commercial to non-profit, hard goods to services, B2C to B2B. Our computer background ranges from PDP-11s (1972) to cutting edge XML projects, and business backgrounds include hands-on experience in automotive, retailing, wholesaling, real estate, book/newspaper/software publishing, technology (mostly software, including open source), advertising, radio/TV, aerospace, banking, financial markets, and construction. All of us have worked with companies ranging from startups to multinationals.

Principals
Nicholas Carroll was trained as a project manager, and gained his experience in projects ranging from small business and startups to IBM and the Library of Congress. Entering computing as a procedural programmer, he now focuses on information architecture, internal and local search, structure of information in databases (including taxonomies), and interface design.

Joel Harris is a mathmatician by schooling, and worked in production and financials for both business and government for twenty years. He made web development a second career, and is now our lead developer.

Grant Bowman is a senior systems engineer and project manager with extensive experience in open source software and HCI hardware. He was a manager with SuSE North America, a leader in early-stage development of the Bootstrap/SRI Hyperscope, and was co-founder of the ISP SVPAL.org in 1993.

Corey McEntyre has an education in physical sciences and computer science, worked as a systems and network administrator for U. North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and until joining Hastings in early 2008 was a senior web analyst at IBM, and manager of the category database underlying www.ibm.com's four million web pages.

Associates
Meghan Ede is a noted strategist in user experience. Her skills include creating user profiles/personas and organizing focus groups and ethnographic studies. She is skilled in rapid prototyping, task analysis, cognitive walkthroughs, flowcharting/storyboarding, usability studies, card-sorting, surveys, and diary studies, and has headed UE departments for Symantec, Sun Micro, Intuit, and Paypal.

Carole Somsel is an art director, colorist, and production manager who migrated from print to the Web in 1996, bringing her skills in visual design, writing, and project management.

Mark Carranza is a programmer with extensive skills in usability, who initiated many of the interactive features now considered best practices in AJAX. He works in Ruby on Rails, .Net C#, SharePoint, PHP, XML, JSON, JQuery, SQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, JavaScript, and standards CSS.

Where We Work
We work in all 50 states and Canada. Along with our work in Northern California, we have recently completed jobs in New York, Oregon, and British Columbia. In this era of email, it is fairly easy to deliver good results to distant clients, with one critical piece of knowledge - the telephone still works, ideally in one-to-one conversations. Where email alone collapses under the weight of confusion and misunderstanding, the combination of email, telephone, and an occasional meeting allow for rapid development and quality work.