Bart Copeland

President & CEO

Bart Copeland brings more than twenty years of leadership, management, finance, and business experience to his position as CEO and President of ActiveState. He is passionate about creating and building the infrastructure and environment at ActiveState that allows our bright people (aka "Activators") to be having a ton of fun while constantly creating and innovating to solve complex problems, produce cool and useful applications that provide real benefits to our customers, through technology solutions that "just work."

In addition to his activities at ActiveState, Bart is active as an angel investor and serves as a director of Credo Interactive, a mentor to the BC Advantage Funds, and is active in promoting and helping Science World British Columbia, a self-supporting non-profit organization that stimulates positive attitudes towards science and technology through a fun interactive environment.

Angie Hirata

Director, Sales & Marketing

Angie Hirata brings more than twelve years of experience in marketing, PR, sales and business development to her position as head of sales & marketing at ActiveState. Prior to joining ActiveState, Angie's successful career included start-ups and large organizations including Maximizer Software, JustSystems, Eyeball Networks, Seagate Software and SEI Industries.

When not helping grow technology companies, you can find Angie at the top of a mountain on skis or at the bottom of the ocean with a scuba tank somewhere in the world.

Jeff Hobbs

Director, Engineering

Jeff Hobbs is chief cat herder of the many talented dev cats at ActiveState.  He is responsible for overall product management and oversees development across the product range (from the languages to tools and also that webby stuff ... oh, and don't forget ActiveDVD), but Jeff is a coder at heart. Now distill, add two olives, and swirl...

Maria Chu

Director, Finance, HR & Admin

Maria has over 13 years of experience in senior financial management roles surrounding all financial reporting aspects, analysis, planning, systems implementation, internal controls, cash management and operational mandates in diverse companies from IT, General Aviation, Real Estate Property Development and Manufacturing in both unionized and privately held companies.

Prior to joining ActiveState, Maria was the Controller for: PowerWallz, AWT Tech, who developed the latest aircraft parts and wing technology for the deHavilland Beavers, WWP, a unionized Saskatchewan based Agricultural plant and the Delta Land/Coal Harbour Properties, a well-known multi-million dollar property developer, who recently sold The Georgia Hotel and developed the award winning "Calisto and Carina" at Coal Harbour. Maria holds her BSc in Accounting and recently obtained her CMA designation.

Advisors

David Ascher

Strategic Advisor

David Ascher is the CEO of Mozilla Messaging and a strategic advisor to ActiveState. As such, David works closely with the ActiveState management team to provide input on strategic opportunities for the company. An ActiveState employee from 2000 to 2007, he was the original team lead for Komodo, managing director and chief technologist of the ActiveState unit during its ownership by Sophos, and most recently CTO and VP Engineering.

Activators

Andreas Kupries

Developer

Andreas works on all things Tcl at ActiveState (ActiveTcl, Tcl Dev Kit, Tcl me elmo, ...). He is an active member of the Tcl community and a member of the Tcl Core Team (TCT).

His work experience revolves mainly around Tcl and C, and his interests include computer security issues, nowadays also hardware simulation, reconfigurable hardware, ... Aside from comp.science you will usually find him reading, mainly sf&f.

Andreas Kupries

Corey Thomas

Languages, Enterprise Account Executive

Corey Thomas brings ten years of business and sales experience to his position as Enterprise Account Manager for ActiveState's business solutions team. Corey has held progressively senior positions at a number of diverse companies including Anixter, SBC Communications and fSONA Systems.

Damien Prystay

Web Developer

Damien helps maintain and improve ActiveState's various web properties. He enjoys doing this so much that he needs to stop writing this bio and get back to it right now!

Eric Promislow

Senior Developer

Eric's career has involved the design and implementation of programming languages, software tools, and user interfaces. He brought that focus to ActiveState in 2000, when he worked on Komodo at its inception. He then took over the Visual Studio integration products, and later moved back to spearhead the integration of Ruby and Rails tools into Komodo.

Before ActiveState Eric was a co-creator of the OmniMark text-processing language, and worked with customers at companies like the Wall Street Journal and Microsoft during the early days of the web. Eric has a MSc. in Computing Science from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and a BSc. in Biophysics from the University of Ontario.

Gisle Aas

Senior Developer, Perl

Gisle is a core Perl developer and has been programming in Perl since 1990. He maintains several Perl modules on CPAN, including LWP. At ActiveState, Gisle's work involves improving ActivePerl and related technologies.

Prior to joining ActiveState, Gisle consulted for Internet and telecom companies in Norway. He started his career as a research scientist at the Norwegian Computing Center, and subsequently joined startup Oslonett as a partner/programmer. He was with Oslonett through several mergers, including the merger with Scandinavia Online, Norway's major Internet portal site. Gisle was the main developer on Kvasir, the Nordic search engine and Internet directory. Gisle holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Tromso, Norway.

Graham Stuart

Technical Support Rep, Languages

Graham has 22 years of experience in customer support, working in the telecom space with Tekmark Global Solutions, Nortel Networks, and Prism Systems since 1994. Graham holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Alberta.

Jan Dubois

Senior Developer, Perl

Jan Dubois is a prominent member of the Perl Community and maintainer of Win32:OLE. He has over 10 years' experience with information management in the financial services sector, a key area of ActiveState's client base for ActivePerl Enterprise Edition, a quality-assured Perl and support package for enterprise clients. At ActiveState, Jan is the technical lead for the Perl Dev Kit.

Prior to joining ActiveState, Jan worked in German banking and insurance firms. He produced research tools to test portfolio management strategies at Hamburg Mannheimer Investment Trust, and was an IT project coordinator of electronic futures and options trading at Vereins und Westbank, Hamburg. In the insurance industry, Jan planned and implemented the information and trading platform for Hamburg Mannheimer Insurance Company's asset management group, and was the information systems manager for the securities division at Albingia Insurance Company. Jan has a Masters Degree in Physics (Diplom-Physiker) from the University of Hamburg.

Jeff Griffiths

Web Developer

Jeff helps maintain and improve ActiveState's various web properties, including the ActiveState Community Site.

Outside of ActiveState, Jeff is active in the local PHP and Drupal communities, and is a key organizer of the Open Web Vancouver conference series.

Jeff's ActiveState Blog

Kendra Penrose (currently on maternity leave)

Enterprise Marketing & Communications Manager

Kendra leads the B2B marketing and communications strategy for the Business Solutions team. A keen interest in online lead generation and content development, she is fascinated by the relationship of social media and marketing and how this applies to the B2B market. Originally she hails from the non-profit sector but has found her home in IT.

Kevin J. Woolley

Systems/ Infrastructure Team Member

Kevin brings a decade of professional systems and network administration experience and over twenty years of personal experience to his position on the systems and infrastructure team. When not working, he can be found indulging in photography, bird watching, various personal computing projects, and spending time with family.

Liliya Apostolova

Enterprise Marketing & Communications Manager

Liliya comes to ActiveState with a background of progressive marketing positions in real estate and hi-tech. She has a B.Comm, majored in Marketing and is an enthusiastic learner. She is fascinated with psychology and will soon be pursuing a Masters in Counseling Psychology.

She loves listening, talking and a glass of good, full-bodied red. 

Michael Simon

Customer Care Coordinator

Michael Simon brings four years of software support experience to ActiveState. Before that he acquired a diploma in Computer Information Systems at Kwantlen University.

When he isn't answering phone calls and replying to tickets, he loves to go hiking, camping and sailing, and spending time with his lovely wife.

Mike Ivanov

Senior Developer

Mike brings to ActiveState his experience in building scalable web applications using Python, PostgreSQL and Linux. He also has a special interest in cloud computing and distributed systems. Mike has a Masters Degree in Computer Science (Large-Scale System Control). 

Shannon Pawliw

Graphic Designer

Shannon comes to ActiveState from a backround of painting, drawing and conceptual art. She made the switch to design when she realized the money was better. Since obtaining her degree in fine art, she has worked on a wide variety of projects including band/event posters, general illustration, branding, logo/ web design, and graphics. She is the builder and trainer of a vast robot army and is biding her time until it can be unleashed upon the unsuspecting world. She is slowly slogging through a series of portraits of everyone she knows.

www.pokedyoureyeout.com

Shannon Yelland

Online Marketing Manager

Shannon comes to ActiveState with a passion for online marketing. She is a web analytics enthusiast, SEO specialist, search engine marketing and social media geek. Shannon is always on the forefront of the latest trends, strategies, and best practices in search engine optimization and analytics. She is Google Adwords Certified and currently taking the UBC Business Intelligence Certificate. Also, in her free time, she shares her expertise on www.seedtheweb.com and Twitter.

Shane Caraveo

Lead Developer and Product Manager, Developer Services

Shane is leading the charge to provide quality, free and cost effective, SaaS solutions for developers on small teams across multiple organizations and or teams within the Enterprise. In his previous incarnation he was chief dragon-wrangler for Komodo where he led the product bringing in web development features and providing an open source editor to our users. In years past he made major contributions to PHP, but is now an avid Python developer. Shane is known for always tackling big bad ugly problems that would give many people bald spots.

Shawn Fullerton

The Unconventional Office Manager

Shawn came here from Alberta because he hated the cold!!! Shortly after arriving in Vancouver, he landed this wonderful job. He was born in Moose Jaw Sask, but raised in Nova Scotia Cape Breton Island. Shawn is happy to be living by so much water once again!

Sheila Rebellato

Sales & Marketing Coordinator

Sheila joined the Sales & Marketing team as the "all around support" girl. With a background in customer service, technical support and marketing she's a well-rounded addition to the team.

She's been known to collect miniature chenille chickens -- we don't ask, and she doesn't try to explain herself!

Sridhar Ratnakumar

Software Developer, Python

Sridhar is a passionate Python developer who spends inordinate amount of time with computers outside of which he tends to read non-fiction mostly related to the human condition. At ActiveState, he is working on improving the ActivePython distribution.

http://nearfar.org/

Tara Gibbs

Web Developer

Tara came to ActiveState with 10 years of web development experience and a degree in Cognitive Science. As part of the Infrastructure team, she contributes to the development and architecture of the many ActiveState web properties.

Tangible

Todd Whiteman

Mozilla Python Wrangler

Todd is a Mozilla, Python and JavaScript hacker working on ActiveState's Komodo IDE.

Todd's ActiveState Blog

Trent Mick

Lead Developer and Product Manager, Komodo & Python

Trent is the lead developer and product manager for Komodo and ActiveState's Python products and services, including ActivePython. With a background in engineering physics and computer science and over a dozen years experience in the software industry, Trent brings a passion for user experience design, cross-platform software development, and good software engineering practice to his role at ActiveState.

Trent maintains a number of small open source Python projects. He was involved in porting core Python to 64-bit platforms (primarily 64-bit Windows) and in defining Python 2.3's standard logging package.

http://trentm.com

Troy Topnik

Technical Writer

After joining ActiveState in 2001 as a "Customer Relationship Representative" (AKA Tech Support), Troy went on to lead the PureMessage Enterprise Support team before moving on to a technical writing role in 2004. His talent for describing how software works to new users stems from his difficulty understanding things that the Senior Developers find obvious.