The Avail Team
Rich Arriaga
Rich is the Chief Financial Officer of the Avail Foundation, LLC...which is basically a glorified way of saying, "he makes sure we pay our web hosting bill". Rich lingered in college for a bit, and as a result of his extended stay, he holds a bachelors degree in Classical Civilizations from Florida State University, a bachelors degree in Mathematics from the University of South Florida, and a masters degree in mathematics from Cleveland State University. He has a diverse professional background that includes software development, data analytics, operations, insurance, and education. Aside from additions to the Avail virtual machine and the Avail standard library, Rich wrote the very first Avail program; a quiz domain specific language. He can also be credited for bringing you the slightly buggy machine-generated API documentation. When not programming or hacking away on the website, he handles the majority of the business side of the Avail Foundation, LLC.
Leslie Schultz
Leslie joined the Avail team in 2011 and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Over the years she's had a variety of job titles, but she always ends up working with and designing software, doing visual design, and writing documentation and training materials. She is currently working on all of the above for the Avail project. Specifically, her ongoing contributions include additions of both code and documentation to the Avail virtual machine and library, writing and editing external documentation, and maintenance of the website.
Todd L. Smith
Todd is the Chief Executive Officer of the Avail Foundation, LLC. He holds a B.A. in Classical Civilization from Florida State University. Having learned to read Latin rather well, he decided to pursue a career in software so that he could actually pay his bills. He has written production-quality software in 16 general-purpose programming languages for companies of varying industry, size, and prominence. Avail first ensnared him in 2007 as a result of his new friendship with Mark van Gulik; he was unable to resist its seductive promises of articulate programming. As of April 2014, he has written about 1.8 megabytes of Avail source code, including the majority of the Avail standard library, and contributed about 20% of the virtual machine by code volume. He has produced most of the public documentation available on the website, and so is largely to blame for the snobbish prose.
Mark van Gulik
Mark studied computer languages through the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1993, his dissatisfaction with the state of the art finally led him to start implementing Avail in his spare time. He worked primarily as a consultant in North America and Europe while continuing to develop Avail from 1993 until 2008, when the Avail team started to grow. With this head start, he invented most of the concepts, technologies, and infrastructure of Avail. Mark is currently focusing his effort toward improving portions of the Avail virtual machine such as the dynamic translator and the macro compiler. His training in classical piano somehow survived his collision with computers in high school, although its fate is unclear in the balance of full time work, acting as the Avail Foundation's Chief Technology Officer, actually developing Avail, and raising three kids in Madison, Wisconsin.
