Relevance is growing fast. A hale and hearty welcome to our four newest full-time teammates:

Stuart Sierra: Stuart Sierra is an actor/singer/writer/coder who lives in New York City, where he is a regular at both LispNYC and the downtown theatre scene. As technical lead of the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia Law School, he developed the groundbreaking legal search engine AltLaw.org. Stuart is the co-author of the book Practical Clojure. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and B.F.A. in Theatre from New York University.

Michael Parenteau: Artist, designer and maker of cool stuff, Michael has devoted most of his life to solving visual problems and exploring creative processes. During his explorations, he has travelled to 49 states leaving a trail of doodles and picking up fantastic stories. When he is not design-thinking or pushing pixels, he may be found with his wife and daughter living in the country… and dreaming of one day visiting Alaska.

Alex Warr: Alex graduated from Duke University with a Bachelors of Science in 2008 after dual-majoring in Psychology and History. He worked for two years as the Arts and Entertainment Managing Editor for The Chronicle, Inc., spent a year in London, UK as a paralegal for Clifford Chance LLP, and first joined the Relevance team as an Office Manager in January, 2010. A strong writer and organizer with a wide breadth of skills, Alex's real value lies in a positive mindset and the ability to enable friends and peers to maximize their potential. He works hard to facilitate both the work hard and play hard aspects of our culture, loves games of wit and skill, and believes the core objective in life is to be in a good mood when it ends.

Jon Distad: Jon has been programming in one form or another for most of his life. After moving from MS-DOS batch scripts to QBASIC and eventually to C++, he decided that there was no reason to know another language and wouldn't even consider using one that didn't compile to native code. Thankfully he was introduced to Scheme and Prolog in college and realized that there were far more interesting ways to write and think about code than he'd ever considered. He eventually learned Ruby and started doing Rails, but his infatuation with LISPs lingered. Now, through Clojure, he can satisfy his academic fascination while also serving a practical end. He is a happy developer. Jon graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2008 with a BA in both Philosophy and Computer Science. He hopes some day to be able to express the former via the latter and feels strongly that functional programming and homoiconic languages will help him get there.

This round of additions solidifies our design competencies, extends our Clojure team even more, and adds some much welcome organizational skill to our growing group. We are truly excited about adding such a great group.