David Furber

Rails Developer / Web Designer / UI Guy

(Ph.D. History, SUNY Buffalo, 2003; M.A. History, Clemson University, 1997)

David Furber

David made his first Web site in 1995, and may have been the first graduate student to code a take-home exam into HTML and turn it in as a Web page.

David has a passion for both web site design and development, both front end visual design and back end programming work. He loves the endless variety of projects and tasks that go into launching a successful Web site.

As Gorges' main designer until Sean Kennedy joined the team, David has produced such designs as Gorges, the Plantsmen Nursery, Lexington Horse, Upscale Remodeling, Light on the Hill, Student Agencies Inc., and the Ithaca Ale House.

David most enjoys the challenge of taking a complex designed page or application and coding it into a functioning reality. His favorite work includes the Cookie and Craft of the Day pages on MarthaStewart.com, the reservation and scheduling system on MiravalResort.com, and the Personal Health Record, My Revolution, and Insurance Store sections of RevolutionHealth.com.

Working with Ruby on Rails since version 1.2 (2007), David's current role is application developer. His Rails apps include AlpacasInTheUSA.com, Showpopr.com, NaturallyGrown.org, and others.

David's skills include::

David with his daughter Dessi
  • Ruby on Rails
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • Ajax
  • jQuery
  • ExtJS
  • wireframes
  • graphic design
  • information architecture
  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • Sphinx

In past lives, David taught 20th Century Europe and Western Civilization courses at SUNY Cortland and Ithaca College. He was a DAAD-Fulbright fellow in Berlin in 2000-2001, and a Charles Revson fellow at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in 2003. His most recent academic engagement was a symposium on colonialism and Nazi occupation in Hamburg, Germany in 2007, which you can read about on his otherwise untended blog. In Empire, Colony, Genocide, you can find an article he co-authored with Wendy Lower on colonialism and Nazi occupation policies in Poland and Ukraine.

Nowadays he spends his spare time with his kids, in his garden, or practicing yoga.

Our Team