All four of the engineers at Dogster met while working at Preview Travel – now Travelocity – primarily under the tutilage of CTO John Petrone. John taught us true IT professionalism: fancy code is nifty but bulletproof code is divine; remaining calm under intense IT pressures is a state of mind; code complete; mistakes happen; meritocracy is best and last but not least coding after drinks is always a waste of time ;>

John is currently the CTO at the massive AutoByTel and was recently honored as an IDG’s Computerworld Premier IT Leader of the Year. From a group of once-young pups on your old staff John, congratulations.

I wrote about John some more on my personal site.