Ward Cunningham
Founder at Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarWard Cunningham is a pioneering software engineer and founder with 17 years of experience dedicated to amplifying the effectiveness of technical experts through simpler methods and novel tools. Best known as the inventor of the wiki and a major contributor to object-oriented design and agile practices, he blends deep technical craft with a long-term focus on collaborative social software. He runs Cunningham & Cunningham and serves as Staff Engineer at New Relic, bringing both entrepreneurial leadership and hands-on engineering to production systems. His open-source work includes leading the federated wiki effort—innovating in federated sharing, drag refactoring, and data visualization—and hands-on contributions across front-end single-page rewrites and server-side architecture. Based in Portland, Oregon, he combines historical perspective on software design with continual experimentation, hacking federated wiki since 2011. Rare among founders, he remains an active coder who shapes both conceptual methods and the low-level implementations that realize them.
17 years of coding experience
Github Skills (15)
html10
css10
json10
javascript10
sinatra10
web-development10
front-end-development10
web-application10
webapp10
ruby10
api-design9
webapi9
user-interface8
interface-design8
ui-design8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
WardCunningham/remodeling
Oct 2016 - Nov 2022
The original wiki rewritten as a single page application
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:116 commits, 12 PRs, 104 pushes in 6 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Ward primarily contributed to the front-end aspects of the wiki application. Their work included refactoring the title formatting, implementing external and internal linking functionality, and adding a search feature. They also incorporated enhancements such as YouTube embedding, ISBN links, and styling improvements to enhance the user experience and overall visual presentation of the application.
single-page-application
WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki
Jun 2011 - May 2016
This wiki innovates by: 1. federated sharing, 2. drag refactoring and 3. data visualization.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1007 commits, 1 PR, 1 push in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Ward primarily contributed to the server-side logic of the federated wiki. They implemented features such as initial node implementation, serving pages, including internal and external links and the creation of a system for page reordering using JavaScript to interact with the Sinatra backend. These updates included setting up a database and core architecture.
data-visualizationrefactoring
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