Hello! My name is Marc Wandschneider. I am one of the lead developers on SWiK and author of Core Web Application Programming with PHP and MySQL, published by Prentice-Hall.

My technical/personal blog is at www.chipmunkninja.com. My travel blogs are at http://travel.lanfear.com

I have been a programmer for well over 15 years, starting out accidentally after spending waaay too much time on a friend’s computer at University.

My key interests in computing have always been in development tools and user interface design and programming. A high quality rapid application development environment with a powerful language, easy to use environment, and a portable (read: small) and fast runtime is a rare thing indeed. Tools such as Visual Basic v1-3 and Borland’s Delphi tool are a dying breed.

In the user interface arena, I am constantly saddened by the amount of time and energy people put into making their applications gratuitously different and thus frustrating for the end user to figure out. Recent operating systems such as Apple’s OS X have made some improvement in enforcing user interface restrictions, but even these are likely susceptible to the inevitable decline seen in popular consumer operating systems such as Windows.

I have recently spent much of my time working with web applications and am interested in how they, especially using all the new rounded corners in Web 2.0, will affect the way in which traditional web applications are developed. I balance my efforts between design, performance, scalability, and maintainability.

Some of the major things I have done in my professional career include:

• Working for Microsoft for nearly 6 years in the 1990s, working on such things as Visual Basic, Visual J++, and WFC. One of the most fun things I did during this time was releases the MarcWan / BaseCtl framework for writing fast, high performance ActiveX Controls (minimum ctl was about 12k, with one page loaded in memory).
• Wrote Kiltdown, an Outlook Express Clone for non-Windows platforms written in Qt.
• Written some persistence code for the TabletPC inking engine.
• Designed and implemented Swik.
• Written a PHP and MySQL Web Application Programming Book.
• My current project is an image viewing program for Mac OS X called JustLooking

I now divide my time between learning spoken languages and spending far too much time in front of my Powerbook. I currenty live in Beijing, China.