The UI Engineering team at Orbitz is growing again, and we are looking for experienced developers to join the team. The team itself is responsible for developing some of the top online travel sites worldwide, including Orbitz.com, CheapTickets, and our European family of sites under the ebookers umbrella.

We are a team of developers who strive for standards-based development, love semantic markup and progressive enhancement, and are always looking to make the most usable sites possible. The work we do is seen by millions booking everything from their monthly business travel to that one-in-a-lifetime family vacation.

We are looking to fill both a Technical Manager position and Senior-level Engineer openings. You can apply via the LinkedIn postings or email me via my contact page.

We are located in the heart of Chicago, but would consider relocation for the right match.

Postings:

• Technical Manager
• Technical Lead / Sr. Engineer

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project was established to help John’s wife Anna offset the tremendous medical expenses incurred during John’s long illness. The goal of this project is to raise $25,000 for that purpose.

From the site:

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project matches accessibility experts with companies that would like a brief review of their site for accessibility. In return, the site owner is asked to contribute a minimum of $500 to The John Slatin Fund. The John Slatin Fund was established to help John’s beloved Anna offset the medical expenses incurred during John’s long illness.

Along with others in the industry, I’ve volunteered my time to perform reviews. If you know of a company interested in a review point them to the sign up page.

The session is intended to introduce microformats and to offer up some examples of where and why they are currently being used.

I’ve also updated the slides to add some corrections and made them available for download.

From the conference agenda:

In this session, Michael Alford and Mark Meeker will describe the major business goals that drove the development of Orbitz Worldwide’s next generation online travel commerce platform, and how those goals were met with Spring and other technologies.

Last summer, Orbitz Worldwide released a new generation of its global technology platform with the goals of internationalization, white-label capability, and faster, streamlined development. Michael and Mark will describe the key challenges of this technology project and how those challenges were addressed, including the good, bad, and ugly of the Spring Framework and Spring Web Flow.

If you are going as well be sure to say hello.

Been busy, so I’m a little late in posting a re-cap. The US Open has ended with Federer and Henin taking the titles. Again this year I was lucky enough to spend time there during the first week of the tournament.

I did manage to have tickets to see the tennis in Aurthur Ashe Stadium where some of the greatest players of the game took the court. But, for me the best matches will always be found on the outer courts. This is where the not so big name players and even some soon to be stars can be seen trying to win their first or second round matches.

My favorite courts on the grounds will always be courts 14 and above — this is where “courtside” seats consist of couple of small metal bleachers which would feel at home at a high school and where the front row seat holders have the advantage of leaning up against the chain-link fence. You can’t get closer to the game than that.

The pictures I took have been added to my photo album. I hope to update this post later this week with the list of matches I got to see.

I’m happy to announce I will be speaking at The Rich Web Experience when it comes to San Jose in September. I expect this to be an excellent event. It is put on by the team responsible for the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposiums which travel around the country. I’ve attended the last two of those in Chicago and it is by far one of the most well run events with excellent sessions.

I’ll be presenting on “Merging Ajax and Accessibility” and a session on Microformats.

Hope to see you there!

I will definitely miss the 5+ hour battery life I was getting on the MacBook, but won’t be missing the cracks in the plastic that kept happening. I’ll try and post pictures of the damage prior to sending it off to Apple Care.

Although, Eric Meyer seems to say it best with his Thanks be to Jobs post.