Don Xml's Grok This

Well, if you hit this page you must (for some bizarre reason) want to find out a little more about the person known as Don Demsak, and I’m not one to disregard the requests of my readers. I’m the CTO of Tellago, and live in New Jersey If you would like to talk to me about what Tellago can do for you, just contact me via the contact page.

I would also guess that you are wondering about some of my background. I’m a college drop out who grew up during the 80’s, so that would make me thirty-something. I went to college for Metallurgical Engineering (Colorado School of Mines), but found programming to be even more fun the chemistry and physics, and it seemed to pay better. I started my career in computers at a major insurance company working on IBM Mainframes. The weird thing is that I learned how to build systems before learning how to code, so I tend to see the big picture first. Eventually I quit the insurance company and went to The Chubb Institute to learn more about mainframe programming (Assembler, Cobol, etc.). I worked as an employee for a bank for 6 months before quitting to become a consultant (when writing 2 small programs in 6 months is considered working too hard, I knew that place wasn’t for me).  I went back to Chubb to learn VB 3.0, and then started working the PC into the apps I developed on the mainframe. During the height of the Y2K craze I could see the end of the line for most mainframe programming, and with my knowledge of MS technologies, I decided cut my ties with the mainframe world and only developed on the Windows platform (I wanted to avoid the rush from the mainframes that would happen after 2000, and any backlash against the Y2K consultants from charging so much for their services). That’s about the time that I first bumped into XML, and became a frequent contributor on VBXML. I also bumped into SVG soon after that, and became known as DonXML on the svg-developers group (back when I think the total post count was under 1000, now over 37K). I was blessed with the opportunity to work a little with .Net prior to the 2000 PDC, but the client eventually decided to build the app using VB6 and XML, but in a style very similar to .Net. Since completing that project, I’ve worked on nothing but .Net. I worked as the tech editor for Kurt Cagle’s SVG Programming book, and eventually got into the blogging world (via my friends GotDotNet). I’ve also started to do presentations at different conferences and user groups.  Which eventually lead to becoming a Microsoft MVP, which then lead to joining Tellago.