Shane Vitarana
I own and operate CrimsonJet, an iPhone app company. CrimsonJet’s most successful product, Drum Kit, was the #2 best selling music app in the iTunes App Store in 2008.
I started programming at age 14 in 1991, before the Internet was mainstream. The first programming language I learned was PPL (now defunct) to write plugins for the BBS I operated out of my parents house. I was lucky to attend a middle school that taught BASIC and a high school that had a course in Pascal. Since then I’ve taught myself C, Java, Ruby, and Cocoa Touch. I’ve authored and contributed to many open source projects, most within the Ruby community, and written a book on Facebook development.
During college at Rutgers University, I mainly focused on the hardware side, and got a dual degree in Computer Engineering and Computer Science. Later I got my M.S at Illinois Institute of Technology, focusing on electromagnetics and nanotechnology.
In my former life, I did software development for some big companies, including Merrill Lynch, Motorola, and Orbitz. I had been wanting to start my own company since the early days of college, and therefore, decided to leave Orbitz in April 2007. Soon after, I founded CrimsonJet and began doing Ruby on Rails consulting. Then I moved on to iPhone apps in March ‘08, right after Apple released the SDK.
I can be contacted at: shanev@gmail.com. Sorry, I’m not available for iPhone development.
