From Teacher To DeveloperFrom Teacher To Developer

Brian McCallister started writing software as a kid, but his first job was teaching English. Then the married 31-year-old began what he calls his "sideways transition" into software development by taking a job writing technical documentation. He began to teach himself scripting languages like Perl and then Java, and eventually became a Java consultant.

McCallister is committed to the open source community and its process for developing software. He moves from one Apache Software Foundation project to another. Over several years, he's become a recognized contributor wherever he shows up. After writing code for the Object/Relational Bridge and Jakarta, he's now contributing to ActiveMQ, an open source messaging service.

He earns a paycheck as a software architect for Ning.com, a startup that's proposing to make it easy to construct social applications on the Web. But he spends his evenings and weekends creating open source code, like a protocol for ActiveMQ that lets it send and receive messages from Ruby, a new scripting language that's being used in a framework, Ruby on Rails, for creating quick Web applications.

McCallister says one of the greatest honors of his life was being one of 30 people elected last year as a member of the Apache Software Foundation. He now serves on the Project Management Committee for the DB Project.

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