About Salsita

“ the team that delivers”

At Salsita we have a simple philosophy: great programmers write great code. So we strive to create an environment where great programmers want to work, with exceptional benefits, cutting edge development processes, interesting and challenging projects, and a marked lack of useless bureaucracy. Our developers generally have a C++ or Java background, a computer science degree (Masters abound, with a few PhDs as well) and a healthy curiosity and desire to learn about new technology.

We offer our clients a unique value proposition: topnotch developers and a cutting-edge agile development methodology applied to the latest JavaScript platforms, frameworks and libraries.

As CEO Matthew Gertner explains: "With the booming interest in JavaScript over the past two years, we tend to forget that it has not always had the best reputation among software developers. The main reason is that most JavaScript programmers are scripters who lack a real programming background. As a result, there's a lot of bad JavaScript code out there. At Salsita, I took the approach I've always taken when building a software development team, hiring the best C++ programmers on the market and training them in the tools, languages and platforms we use. As a result we have a rare value proposition: a team of top-notch software engineers well-versed in a wide range of JavaScript technologies such as Node.js, Backbone, AngularJS, Mocha, Jasmine, CoffeeScript, jQuery and Underscore as well as Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer extensions. We recognize that JavaScript is not just the lingua franca of the web, but a powerful and subtle language in its own right backed by a burgeoning ecosystem."

Our background is in browser extensions, particularly in addressing the massive engineering challenge of getting a common codebase to run in all of the popular browsers. We've been pioneers in using the most modern JavaScript techniques in browser extensions, including CommonJS modules and model-view-controller frameworks like Backbone to create elegant and highly maintainable code.

Lately we've been applying our JavaScript expertise to a wide range of problems. We're excited about the explosion of innovation and interest around JavaScript that has been triggered by Node.js. We're fans and avid users of MVC frameworks like Backbone and AngularJS, testing frameworks like Jasmine and Mocha and utility libraries like Underscore and jQuery. We're also big proponents of CoffeeScript.

About Our Founder

Matthew Gertner, Salsita's founder and CEO, was born in London and grew up on the East Coast of the United States. He began programming on his father's Hewlett Packard calculator at the tender age of nine, and went on to study Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. A lifelong fan of European languages, culture and cuisine, he moved to Paris in 1992.

Stints as a software developer and then project manager led him to Hamburg, Germany, where he lived and worked for three years. He then moved to Prague to start a software services business called Schemantix. Schemantix rode the highs of the dot com boom, most notably as a supplier of services and technology to Commerce One, a leading business-to-business platform company and one of the period's brightest stars. Matthew was blown away by the breadth and depth of the software development talent in the Czech Republic, and he has settled permanently in the country with his Czech wife and their baby daughter.

In 1995, Matthew founded AllPeers, which developed and marketed a Firefox extension for creating private peer-to-peer sharing networks. At the time, the extension was easily one of the most ambitious and sophisticated ever developed and won awards from prestigious publications such as PC World, Wired and CNet's Webware.

With the experience he gained at AllPeers, Matthew spent several years as a freelance consultant for big industry names like Yahoo, VMware and Mozilla. During this period he led the development of a Mozilla Labs project called Prism (later WebRunner), a "single-site browser" that enabled users to turn web apps into desktop apps with a single click. When he found that he was turning away more projects than he could take on, he founded Salsita in 2010. Since then, his focus has been on assembling a world-class team of software engineers specializing in what he calls "JavaScript software engineering".

Matthew writes about a wide range of technological topics as the primary author of the Salsita blog. He has given talks at a number of leading industry conferences including OSCON, Media in Transition, FOSDEM, Reboot and FooCamp.