Ian Gilfillan works part-time for the MariaDB Foundation, mostly working on the MariaDB documentation.
He has majors in IT as well as English and Philosophy, developed and taught various web and database programming courses, and wrote the first online grocery store in South Africa in the 90s.
He was lead developer for South Africa’s largest media company, and wrote the book Mastering MySQL 4 in 2002 based on his experiences there. He wrote regular columns on MySQL and web programming in the 2000s, before founding and developing an online organic food co-operative in 2005.
He has also been an active Wikimedian since 2003, and is currently on the Wikimedia South Africa board.
