Callum James Henderson-Begg (born 17 January 1981), known as Cal Henderson, is a British computer
programmer and author based in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
.
Education
Henderson attended
Sharnbrook Upper School and Community College
Sharnbrook Academy, formerly Sharnbrook Upper School until 2017, is a large, rural academy school located in Sharnbrook, a village in the English county of Bedfordshire. Built in 1975, the school now has over 1900 students and around 300 s ...
, and
Birmingham City University
, mottoeng = "Do what you are doing; attend to your business"
, established = 1992—gained university status1971—City of Birmingham Polytechnic1843—Birmingham College of Art
, type = Public
, affiliation = ...
where he graduated with a degree in software engineering in 2002.
Career
Henderson is best known as the co-founder and
chief technology officer at
Slack, as well as co-owning and developing the online creative community
B3ta
B3ta (stylised as b3ta) is a popular British website, described as a "puerile digital arts community" by ''The Guardian''. It was founded in 2001 by Rob Manuel, Denise Wilton and Cal Henderson.
B3ta's main feature is a newsletter featuring ...
with Denise Wilton and
Rob Manuel
Rob Manuel (born 5 December 1973) is the English co-founder of the website B3ta (where he is affectionately known as "the Ginger Führer").
Work
Manuel is responsible for numerous quizzes and Flash animations. He has also collaborated with Joel Ve ...
; being the chief software architect for the photo-sharing application
Flickr
Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professional ...
(originally working for
Ludicorp
Ludicorp was a company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, that created Flickr and Game Neverending. It was founded in 2002 by Stewart Butterfield, Caterina Fake and Jason Classon and was bought by Yahoo! on March 20, 2005.
Ludicorp' ...
and then
Yahoo
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...
); and writing the book ''Building Scalable Web Sites''
for
O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books, produces tech conferences, and provides an online learning platform. Its distinctive brand features a woodcut of an ...
.
He has also worked for
EMAP
Ascential plc, formerly EMAP, is a British business-to-business media business specialising in exhibitions & festivals and information services. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
History
Ric ...
as their technical director of special web projects and is responsible for writing City Creator
among many other websites, services and desktop applications. Cal was the co-founder and VP of engineering at
Tiny Speck,
the company whose internal tool transitioned into Slack.
Henderson's connection to
Stewart Butterfield
Daniel Stewart Butterfield (born Dharma Jeremy Butterfield; March 21, 1973) is a Canadian billionaire businessman, best known for co-founding the photo-sharing website Flickr and the team-messaging application Slack.
Early life and education
In ...
and Slack began through a game developed by Butterfield's first company, Ludicorp, called ''Game Neverending''. He ran a fan website dedicated to the game and broke into an internal Ludicorp mailing list. Instead of repercussions, Butterfield hired Henderson to work for his company.
Personal life
Henderson is
color blind
Color blindness or color vision deficiency (CVD) is the decreased ability to see color or differences in color. It can impair tasks such as selecting ripe fruit, choosing clothing, and reading traffic lights. Color blindness may make some aca ...
, and has worked on applications to make the web more accessible to the color blind.
He is also a frequent contributor to
open-source software
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...
projects and runs a number of utility websites, such as Unicodey, to make certain programming tasks easier.
References
External links
Personal websiteGitHub contributions2006 Future of Web Apps Talk
1981 births
British bloggers
Living people
Web developers
Computer programmers
People educated at Sharnbrook Academy
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