Rael Dornfest is an American

computer programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a progr ...

and author. He was a technical fellow and CTO of Charity: Water, and was previously an engineer at

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

. He was founder and

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

of Values of N, creator of "I Want Sandy" and "Stikkit: Little Yellow Notes that Think." Previously, he was chief technology officer at

O'Reilly Media O'Reilly Media, Inc. (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that provides technical and professional skills development courses via an online learning platform. O'Reilly also publishes b ...

. He began working for Twitter after they bought the assets of his company Values of N. He led the

RSS-DEV Working Group The RSS-DEV Working Group was the outgrowth of a fork in RSS format development. The private, non-commercial working group began with a dozen members in three countries, and was chaired by Rael Dornfest, researcher and developer of the Meerkat RSS ...

, which authored

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...

1.0 and is the author of Blosxom, a lightweight

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

-based publishing system. He was series editor of O'Reilly's ''Hacks'' series, and has coauthored a number of books including '' Google Hacks'' (), ''Mac OS X Panther Hacks'' (), and ''Google: The Missing Manual'' ().

References

External links

@rael
- Twitter page
Rael Dornfest
- Author bio at O'Reilly

- Article by Dornfest for

TechTV TechTV was an American cable television channel with a focus on technology. It was launched as ZDTV on May 11, 1998, by computer magazine publisher Ziff Davis, Ziff-Davis following two short-lived technology-based programs by the company. Init ...

Rules for Remixing (IT Conversations)
a recording of a presentation at the 2005 Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American male bloggers American bloggers American computer programmers American technology writers O'Reilly writers American chief technology officers University of California, Davis alumni American technology chief executives 21st-century American non-fiction writers {{US-compu-bio-stub