Cal_Henderson Knowpia

Cal Henderson
Cal Henderson
	Cal Henderson in 2010
Born	Callum James Henderson-Begg; 17 January 1981 (age 43)
Nationality	British
Occupation(s)	computer programmer, author

Callum James Henderson-Begg (born 17 January 1981), known as Cal Henderson, is a British computer programmer and author based in San Francisco.

Education edit

Henderson attended Sharnbrook Upper School and Community College,^[1] and Birmingham City University where he graduated with a degree in software engineering in 2002.^[2]

Career edit

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^[3] with Denise Wilton and Rob Manuel; being the chief software architect for the photo-sharing application Flickr^[4] (originally working for Ludicorp^[5]^[6] and then Yahoo); and writing the book Building Scalable Web Sites^[7] for O'Reilly Media.

He has also worked for EMAP as their technical director of special web projects^[8] and is responsible for writing City Creator^[9] among many other websites, services and desktop applications. Cal was the co-founder and VP of engineering at Tiny Speck,^[10] the company whose internal tool transitioned into Slack.

Henderson's connection to Stewart Butterfield 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.^[5]

Personal life edit

Henderson is color blind, and has worked on applications to make the web more accessible to the color blind.^[4] He is also a frequent contributor to open-source software projects and runs a number of utility websites, such as Unicodey, to make certain programming tasks easier.

Politics edit

In August 2022, Henderson contributed $50,000 to The Next 50, a liberal political action committee (PAC).^[11]

References edit

^ "Cal Henderson is the co-founder of the San Francisco-based Tiny Speck". Sharnbrook Upper School. June 2014.^{[permanent dead link]}
^ "Slack co-founder Cal Henderson urges graduates to be their own boss". Birmingham City University. Retrieved 1 November 2017.
^ "Interview with B3ta co-founder Rob Manuel". BBC. August 2005. Retrieved 12 June 2007.
^ ^a ^b Forrest, Conner (13 April 2015). "Cal Henderson: Slack CTO. Author. Science fiction fan". TechRepublic.
^ ^a ^b Honan, Mat. "The Most Fascinating Profile You'll Ever Read About a Guy and His Boring Startup". WIRED. Retrieved 4 May 2018.
^ "The Team: Web Development Lead: Cal Henderson". Ludicorp. Archived from the original on 11 February 2004.
^ "O'Reilly catalog - Building Scalable Web Sites". O'Reilly Media. Retrieved 12 June 2007.
^ "Cal Henderson: Executive Profile & Biography - Bloomberg". www.bloomberg.com. Retrieved 4 May 2018.
^ "City Creator - Yahoo! picks for September 16, 2003". Yahoo!. Archived from the original on 9 January 2007. Retrieved 12 June 2007.
^ "Stewart Butterfield's Tiny Speck team". cnet.com. 9 February 2010.
^ "The Next 50 PAC PAC Donors". OpenSecrets. Archived from the original on 27 December 2022. Retrieved 27 December 2022.