Callum James Henderson-Begg (born 17 January 1981), known as Cal Henderson, is a British 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 development, ''software developer'' and Software engineering, ''software engineer' ...
and author based in
San Francisco
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
.
Education
Henderson attended
Sharnbrook Upper School and Community College, and
Birmingham City University
Birmingham City University (abbrev. BCU) is a university in Birmingham, England. Initially established as the Birmingham College of Art with roots dating back to 1843, it was designated as a polytechnic (United Kingdom), polytechnic in 1971 an ...
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; being the chief software architect for the photo-sharing application
Flickr
Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, 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 previously a co ...
(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's ...
and then
Yahoo
Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...
); and writing the book ''Building Scalable Web Sites''
for
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 has also worked for
EMAP
Ascential (formerly EMAP) was a British-headquartered global company, specialising in events, intelligence and advisory services for the marketing and financial technology industries. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange until it was ac ...
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, color vision deficiency (CVD) or color deficiency is the decreased ability to see color or differences in color. The severity of color blindness ranges from mostly unnoticeable to full absence of color perception. Color bl ...
, 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 Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...
projects and runs a number of utility websites, such as Unicodey, to make certain programming tasks easier.
Politics
In August 2022, Henderson contributed $50,000 to The Next 50, a liberal
political action committee
In the United States, a political action committee (PAC) is a tax-exempt 527 organization that pools campaign contributions from members and donates those funds to campaigns for or against candidates, ballot initiatives, or legislation. The l ...
(PAC).
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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