Meet the Forge Development Team

The Boss

Ken Lalobo, Manager

Ken has over ten years development experience. He wrote his first piece of commercial software in 1998 at the age of 20 when he and a colleague created VRKitchen, a simple yet powerfull CAD system for designing kitchens aimed at small to medium sized businesses. Since then he has worked on many web development projects for various companies including Frogtrade, Ebuyer and MyJobGroup. Ken has experience in developing in PHP, JavaScript, Java, ASP, Visual Basic on both Windows and Linux and is an advocate (to the annoyance of his staff) of certain web development technologies and techniques such as unobtrusive javascript, the separation of CSS and HTML and MVC.

In his spare time, Ken plays football. He is also a keen dancer and has won various competitions.

Developers

Craig Jackson, Developer

Craig joined the team in July 2007. After completing his degree at Sheffield Hallam University, Craig wanted to work in a dynamic and challenging environment to put his skills to good use. Craig specialises in PHP, xHTML, CSS, Javascript and XML.

With over three years of commercial experience, Craig's passion is to develop creative web applications. Craig has previously worked on large scale projects for Becta, National Australia Bank and The Sheffield Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

In his spare time, Craig enjoys music, film and socialising.

Tom Croft, Developer

Tom joined the team in April 2007 and has over 6 years development experience. Tom brings specialist knowledge of ActionScript to the team, along with the usual web technologies such as PHP and MySQL. Tom comes from a musical background and has worked on the innovative and ground breaking YouBloom system.

Outside of work he enjoys music, and plays rhythm guitar and backing vocals with his band Strange Sky Exit.

David Manners, Developer

Before joining this team in September 2007, David completed his degree in Software Engineering at the University of Sheffield including a 12 week placement working for HSBC in their ATM development team.

Being someone who thrives on technical challenges and learning new technology, he was seeking a role that would stimulate his creativity and provide challenges enabling him to learn new techniques and technologies. Working here has provided him with plenty of challenges and helped him to expand his technical knowledge. David specialises in PHP, JavaScript, CSS, Java and Prolog.

In his spare time David plays Football, is a lighting technician, enjoys watching films and listening to music.

Testers

Sally Eldin-Dalziel, Systems Tester

Sally has worked as a systems tester for over 2 years. Sally has developed greatly since starting here, furthering and increasing her knowledge in systems testing. Her attention to detail and meticulous nature to do things correctly are what help her become a great asset to the team.

In her spare time Sally likes to film, whether it be as a sound operator to editor to director. She currently is a co-director of an independent film company Troika+ltd.

Star Trek Fanatics

Ian Simpson, System/Database Administrator

Ian joined the Forge team in March 2008. His primary function at Forge is to maintain the development and live server systems, with an emphasis on the MySQL servers that power most of Forge's products.

Ian graduated from the University of Sheffield with a Masters in Computer Science in 2003, and has been working in the software industry ever since. He is a skilled Linux system administrator, with experience in mail servers (Postfix, Qmail), web servers (Apache), and databases (MySQL). He also considers Perl superior to PHP, which causes a little wrangling with the web developers.

In his spare time, Ian enjoys reading, playing badminton, and walking in the Peak District.