Allan Wolinski is in charge of office culture. As VP, Operations, he recruits new employees and coaches them in the principles of Agile software development, which he advocates with a fervor bordering on the evangelical. Allan’s pastimes include soccer and sailing. For a while, one of his sailboats sat in the middle of the VendAsta office, which is why (in case you were wondering) our logo is shaped like a sail.

Andreas Grunewald first came to Saskatchewan as a computer science exchange student in 2003-04. A native of Mainz, Germany (hometown of fellow technological innovator Johannes Gutenberg), Andreas earned his master’s at Darmstadt University of Technology, then joined the huge multinational IT company CSC, where he was an early advocate for Agile practices. After stints in England and Norway, in 2010 he returned to Saskatoon with his Canadian wife.

Blair Kelsie is a mobile wizard who has developed apps for PDAs, BlackBerrys, and iPhones. Before joining VendAsta he worked as a web designer, programmer, and team manager at various high-tech companies in Saskatoon. Born in Halifax, Blair gave up a career as a chef and restaurant manager to study software engineering at the University of Saskatchewan. We frequently exploit his mixological skills by forcing him to bartend at company parties.

Boniffer Ipac, our office administrator, hails from the Philippines. She studied computer science at a college in La Union where, upon graduating, she was promptly hired as an instructor. Later she transferred to the nearby state university, where she acquired her master’s in technological education and taught for five years. After a stint doing IT and accounting in Singapore, Boniffer decided to try Canada. We hired her before her suitcase was fully unpacked.

Brendan King is VendAsta’s public face, voice, and disconcertingly boisterous laugh. As CEO, he’s involved in every aspect of the business. He even sits in on technical meetings, quietly catching up on his email in the darkest corner of the room, then popping his head up to ask the obvious, inconvenient question that everyone has been trying to avoid facing. Brendan is a serial entrepreneur who founded his first business, an athletic clothing store, while still in university. It went broke after two years. His subsequent ventures have turned out better.

Ches Hagen, when he’s not on the phone with potential partners, can be found exploring the British Columbia backcountry by snowmobile, ATV, or boat. Ches is the only member of the VendAsta management team not based in Saskatoon, but he flies in from Vancouver a few times a year for planning meetings, Brendan’s summer pool party, and the November deer hunt.

Chris Daviduik came to us with a dual degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Saskatchewan. In 2010 his increasingly successful sideline as singer-songwriter for the band Sexy Mathematics motivated him to migrate from Saskatoon to Toronto, where he remains on the VendAsta team, Skyping in every morning from the living room of his condo on trendy King Street West.

Cody Kurz is a jazz bassist and an advocate of polyphasic sleeping, the practice of taking short naps throughout the day in order to gain extra waking hours at night. A graduate of the University of Saskatchewan’s computer science program, he’s handy with hardware, building a classic-style arcade cabinet in his spare time.

Dale Bruce Hopkins, with an engineering physics degree from the U of S and several years of software experience under his belt, co-founded LucidHelix Solutions in 2008. The company specialized in diagnostic software for digital television networks, employing seven developers at its peak. Dale is a certified snowboard instructor and a CrossFit cultist who visits the gym at least once a day.

Guy Kelsey rides a longboard. His Ultimate Frisbee team is named after Che Guevara. He’s also our VP, Product Management, an experienced executive who has spent twenty years building software for big industrial and agriculture companies. It seems like these personas ought to clash, but Guy has some kind of Zen balance thing going, he makes it work.

Jason Collins is, at heart, a geek. He says that when working on difficult code he achieves “a certain type of meditative state, almost like a runner’s high.” As Chief Technical Officer, he spends half his time absorbed in code, and the other half in meetings. He rolls his eyes when we come to him with ambitious ideas that turn out to be wildly complicated and impractical. Then he enters his meditative state and finds a way to make them work.

Jeff Read would have named his kids after characters in the Dune universe if his wife had let him. A graduate of the University of Saskatchewan’s computer science program, Jeff went on to manage software development at Pic’N'Del, the online grocery store, and Cover-All Building Systems. Here at VendAsta he found a more appreciative audience for his repertoire of sarcastic comments.

Jeff Tomlin holds the title of VP, Marketing, and also takes responsibility for long-term planning and dreaming big. Jeff tends to stand back and look at the whole picture while his co-workers are hunched over the canvas with magnifying glasses. He’s the go-to guy for questions like “How did we get here?” and “What’s the next step?” and, of course, “Who the heck do we think we are, anyway?”

John Fothergill, in his role as VP, Product Development, spends his days sweating over scroll bars and drop-down menus and all the little details of how our software looks and feels. John is known for an intimidating level of perfectionism and an ability, when he’s working, to block out all distractions. If he doesn’t answer you, he’s not being rude, he just didn’t hear you. Ask him again.

Ken Barteski, our CFO, attended a one-room school up to grade five, presumably barefoot and with a buggy whip tucked in the back pocket of his coveralls. Replacing the buggy whip with a commerce degree, he oversaw the finances of three high-tech startups before launching his own company, K3 Kensulting Inc., in 1997. Ken is active in golf, racquetball, and darts, and is the treasurer of the Saskatoon Stock Car Racing Association.

Liz Syrnick joined us short-term to help create an animated ad, but she proved so useful that we kept her around. Her goal is to get into animation or comics, for which she prepares by drawing obsessively and devouring manga and graphic novels. Liz knows more about Pokémon than a ten year old Japanese boy. She also plays keyboards, but her bandmate (VendAsta’s Chris Daviduik) moved to Toronto, leaving her between projects.

Mariatta Wijaya recalls playing video games as a young girl in Indonesia, marvelling at how these two buttons labeled A and B could control the tiny person on the screen. That was the start of her infatuation with technology, which led her to Canada at the age of 19 to study computer science at the University of Saskatchewan. Graduating with honours, she went on to help design automatic toll road systems at IRD Inc. before joining VendAsta.

Marie-Louise de la Harpe, our graphic designer, studied applied graphics at the University of Stellenbosch, near Cape Town. She made her living as a freelance graphic artist and web designer before coming to Canada. She describes herself primarily as a frustrated painter.

Michael A. Charles has little formal education but was known, in his high school days, to skip class and head to the library. He spent his early twenties in Vancouver, writing an unsellable screenplay, then returned to Saskatoon, taught himself Flash, and created the beloved animated short film Garson Hampfield, Crossword Inker. Since joining VendAsta he has had a hand in composing most of our written materials, including these bios for the website.

Mike Bree, originally from Ottawa, has a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Saskatchewan. As a freelance software designer he created a medical office management system that does scheduling, billing, and document management. While employed at QCC Communications he designed and implemented software for Nortel DWDM optical fibre systems. He lived in Florida for a couple years but returned to Saskatchewan for the superior beach culture.

Mike Lippold grew up in the Kootenays without ever learning to ski, hunt, or fish. He was too busy tinkering in the computer lab at the community college where his parents worked. Sick of hiding from the sun, he got his bachelor’s degree in biological anthropology and spent a summer counting rhesus monkeys in Florida. But Mike soon realized that his destiny lay indoors after all, switched to computer science, and wound up taking his master’s at the University of Saskatchewan.

Nasir Khan is a graduate of Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan. He worked as a developer and systems analyst for a transportation company in Lahore before following his brother to Canada in 2003. Prior to VendAsta he worked at QA Technologies, where he developed and tested a vehicle monitoring system. Nasir used to play cricket, but now (opportunities for cricket being limited in the Canadian prairies) he just watches it on TV.

Nathan Poellet has always loved making things. In high school he built a hovercraft that never quite got off the ground. Self-motivated and largely self-taught, in his free time Nathan runs his own video game company, Monoclesoft. While waiting for his career as a game designer to take off, he’s worked at a variety of Saskatoon tech companies, always maintaining his focus on usability and design.

Nathan Rhodes is a Saskatchewan farmboy, a graduate of the Edwards School of Business, and a Certified International Trade Professional. He previously worked at Saskatchewan Trade & Export Partnership, where he helped local companies reach deals with buyers all over the world. With his experience as a business intelligence analyst, Nathan claims he can find out “almost anything about anybody”, a superpower which he chivalrously declines to use for blackmailing purposes.

Phoenix Mao came from Zhengzhou, China to study computer science at the University of Saskatchewan. After graduating she designed and implemented web content management systems for a local internet startup. Since joining VendAsta she has contributed to our social software and corporate training solutions. Phoenix loves fashion, good food, and karaoke.

Scott Warren studied commerce and economics at the University of Queensland in his native Brisbane, then embarked on the Aussie youth’s obligatory post-graduate around-the-world backpacking adventure. Back home, Scott spent three years as an Agile Software Test Analyst at Australia’s largest online accommodation provider before his unquenched wanderlust brought him to Canada.

Shawn Rusaw got his bachelor’s degree at the University of Saskatchewan and his master’s at Simon Fraser, then went to Oxford for his doctorate in computer science. After returning to Canada he lived for a while in Vancouver where he worked for Cray building supercomputers. Shawn enjoys running and eating.

Tiffany Pennycook is a smalltown girl from Carrot River who grew up dreaming of the bright lights of Saskatoon. After graduating from the University of Saskatchewan with degrees in marketing and operations management, she spent a couple years in the marketing department at Cover-All Building Systems before joining us at VendAsta. Her business card describes her role as “Marketing and Strategic Partner Development”, which she defines as “working to make our partners happy”.

Yuan Wang, as a teenager in Beijing, wanted to be a documentary filmmaker. Then one day he attempted a simple program in Visual Basic and found that he loved it. Yuan studied at Wuhan, then went to Sweden for his M.Sc. in Information Systems. Finding Scandinavia insufficiently frigid and remote, he applied for and won a scholarship to the University of Saskatchewan, where he studied adaptive distributed software systems.