Full Circle -- May 2008

Greetings!

Welcome to another issue of "Full Circle" - the Summersault newsletter. This week, we're celebrating the fact that Matthew Christian has been with Summersault for five years - that's almost half of our existence as a company! As a software developer, Matt often works behind the scenes here, so we thought you might want to get to know him a little better:

Q: How did you first get involved in software development?
I was planning on being a Mathematics major in college, and I knew there were some similarities between Math and Computer Science. So, I decided to take an introductory programming class, and I've been hooked ever since.

Q: What's your favorite part of working at Summersault?
Wow, it's hard to pick just one favorite part. I really do enjoy the development work we do here, it's so fun and challenging. I love that Summersault is a small business because that makes it possible to get to know all the employees here and become more of a close-knit group.

Q: What text editor do you use for programming, and why?
I use Aquamacs, an Emacs clone for Mac OS X. Throughout the years, I've come up with a nice ".emacs" file that has a lot of preferences and customizations that are very helpful to me. As a software developer, I spend most of my day using my text editor, so it really is important to have it configured exactly the way I like it.

Q: In the five years you've been here, what's surprised you most about the Internet and Web technologies?
I'm continually amazed at the way the Internet has empowered individuals though global communication. With the prevalence of video sharing sites, social networking sites, wikis, and blogs, regular people now have the ability to be seen and heard in capacities I never would have thought possible five years ago. Of course, this phenomenon isn't necessarily always a good thing, but it sure makes this a fascinating time to be alive.

Have you ever wondered what you could do to help make the world a better place for millions of homeless pets? That's the driving question behind the work of 1-800-Save-A-Pet.com, a national, not-for-profit pet adoption charity that helps shelters, humane societies, SPCAs, pet rescue groups, and pet adoption agencies advertise their homeless pets to adopters for free.

It also creates some challenging but fun technical puzzles for the Summersault team. Since building the site from the ground up several years ago, we're constantly working on new ways to harness the power of the Internet to make pet saving easier, faster and more accessible. From creating better web tools for shelters and rescue groups, to designing Facebook pet-searching applications, to keeping the site running fast when it's mentioned on television shows, our work on the 1-800-Save-A-Pet.com site always makes for an interesting day.

Learn more and search for adoptable pets in your area by visiting 1-800-Save-A-Pet.com.