Jonathan Russell is a Senior Software Engineer at Pioneering Evolution, LLC. Colleagues describe him as "I've known Jon since we attended the Master of Internet Technologies program (now known as the Masters of Business and Technology) at UGA's Terry College of Business. Some programming skill was supposed to be a pre-requisite to joining the program, but members had widely varied levels of experience. Jon was the one team member the most willing and motivated to work and learn with me for hours on end toward completing our thesis project. Even during the holidays, Jon was online working diligently to ensure our project was high quality and completed on time. After completing our degrees and early in our careers working together at a small web development company in Athens, I could tell he had a natural eye for interface design. He usually did the initial design work for websites we built for clients. And he was able to quickly pick up programming patterns, languages, and techniques. We did a great deal of work in the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) as well as frontend technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). We built a CMS from scratch that drove all our customer sites. We later worked together at Digital Insight (know for most of that time as Intuit's Financial Services Division) where he joined to initially work as a web developer. We both worked on numerous frontend sites for banks and credit unions and internal automation projects. He single-handedly designed and developed several tools used by our Project Managers. TL;DR I can't say enough good things about Jon, his work ethic, and his ability. Regardless of the role or company, I'm confident he's going to be successful." and "Jon and I worked together for approximately 4 years. For the first year, he was a colleague on my team, and then he became my direct manager. Over the final year of our work history together, we were cross-team colleagues working together. From the perspective of a colleague and someone brand new on the job, Jon was very knowledgeable about our job, the systems we worked with, and the intricate details of the products our team implemented. He was always willing to assist with any questions that I had, and he was a fantastic mentor for me while I learned the best way to interact with our customers at financial institutions and internal teams. When Jon became my manager, we adjusted our interactions accordingly, but in specific areas Jon was still my primary go-to person for questions. He continued to be the most knowledgable on our team about all of our web products and technical details relating to web based on his experience working in web development before he came to our team. Jon's interaction style as a manager was exceptional - he was always calm and collected even during escalations. He encouraged the team to succeed and was always an advocate for us. During the last few months of our shared work history, I transitioned to a new role. As such, Jon's and my interaction changed again to where my new role was developing processes and tools for his team to utilize on a daily basis. Nevertheless, our coordination remained strong and we frequently discussed ways to improve the way our respective teams delivered content for our customers. Jon possessed an innate ability to brainstorm the best method of solving a problem without being constrained by perceived or real limits. I think it's important to note that when Jon moved into a managerial role, his focus necessarily changed but he didn't leave his technical roots behind. He developed, maintained, and consistently added features to a tool that his team used regularly to track their projects, make notes, track time, and submit tickets to other teams. I was very impressed by his dedication to deliver and maintain a very useful tool despite his other obligations. To summarize, I think Jon has a ton of great qualities and would be a fantastic addition in just about any role. His work ethic, drive for innovation, and interpersonal communication skills are awesome. I will add for the record that despite it being many years since we worked together - I still miss him! "