The Rapids

The mood is celebratory at Green River! We are excited to announce the addition of Lisa Marie Smith, David Houghton, Todd Blackman, and Mark McGraw to our team. When new people join us, they bring not only new skills, but their experiences and perspectives as well. For our company to remain committed to both a standard of excellence, and the promotion of a more sustainable world, we depend on a team made of exceptional people. Programmers like Todd, Mark, Lisa, and David, are not only good at what they do, but they are willing to look beyond technology and assess the meaning of their work in terms of the greater world.

This past August we hired Lisa Marie Smith. Lisa is a software engineer and manager with experience in civil engineering. Her diverse professional background has proved a great asset to us. In the past few months she’s worked with us as a Rails programmer, project manager and technical writer. Lisa is a talented programmer who has spent the past 20 years in a succession of developer and analyst roles. She has grown her own skills as the world of the Internet and e-commerce emerged and evolved, and has worked on both enterprise applications and externally facing consumer apps. Lisa shares a Vermonter’s love of nature and time spent outdoors, but from the beauty of Southern Utah, where she lives with her family.

David Houghton joined us in November. A linguist by training, David is attracted to natural language processing and machine learning. The languages he worked in before focusing on Ruby at Green River include Java, Perl, Scala, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C++, and Lua. He is a long-time resident of West Brattleboro, and the husband of Paula Melton, the managing editor of one of our close colleagues, Building Green. Since starting with us, David has been doing an outstanding job collaborating on the gresb.com and gbig.org green building software.

Senior Rails developers Todd Blackman and Mark McCraw have joined us this month. Todd comes to Green River following five years of developing back-end database- and data-driven Rails systems covering essentially all levels of development. He graduated from the University of Kansas with a masters degree in computer science. His overall profile is heavy on back-end software development with databases - where SQL dialects are his specialty - and he also has extensive experience with Linux. He is looking forward to moving to Brattleboro with his partner this week!

Mark McGraw comes to Green River after experience in both freelance web development and as a lead developer for large software companies. Mark is a seasoned full-stack developer skilled in creating analytics dashboards and building energy management applications. He has worked with a diverse range of languages, business functions, and operations challenges. He’s even written test software for rockets at Cape Canaveral!

We are thrilled to welcome these new members to our team. We anticipate great things from them because all four all bring so much to our team, and have a strong commitment to the ideals which infuse the spirit of Green River.