Ara Pehlivanian has been working on the Web since 1997. He now works for Nurun* as a Senior Client-side developer and Tech Lead working on projects for highly visible clients.
Don Nguyen's background is in building real time trading systems to analyze every single transaction for multiple markets spanning many years. Applications had to be fast, scalable and fault tolerant. These are exactly the same principles that need to be applied to modern day web applications.