Ryan Roemer is the Director of Engineering at Curiosity Media, a language learning startup, where he manages technical operations and leads the development team. He develops (and tests) full-stack JavaScript applications and backend Node.js services. He also works with data mining, cloud architectures, and problems related to large scale distributed systems.
He was previously an engineer in the cloud computing storage group of Microsoft's Azure platform and most recently developed the search and cloud architecture for IP Street, a patent data mining startup. Besides engineering, he is a registered patent attorney (inactive), although it has been a long time since he has put on his lawyer hat.
This book simply would not have been possible without the open source community, which has contributed to all the pieces of technology we have discussed in this book. In particular, the Backbone.js community's commitment to documentation, tutorials, and guides allows the rest of the Web to keep up with the amazingly rapid evolution of the Backbone.js library and ecosystem.
I would like to thank the JavaScript developer communities in the District of Columbia and Seattle, WA, for their incidental feedback, chats, and ideas throughout the development of the book. Additionally, I owe a debt of gratitude to the book's technical reviewers, as they put up with some quite rough early drafts of chapters, provided immensely useful feedback, and helped shepherd the book to its final form.
Finally, my most heartfelt thanks and love to my wife, Robin. Your support and help through the late nights, weekends, and a hectic cross-country move has been truly indispensible.