Eugene Ivashin was born in Russia and currently resides in Kiev, Ukraine.
He graduated from Dnepr State Academy of Building and Architecture in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine and got a diploma with distinction as a Building Industry Automation Engineer in 1997.
He has since worked at South Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant as a repair engineer (six and half years) and got interested in web development at that time. By the end of 2003, Eugene left SU NPP, headed to Kiev and became a web programmer in a small private web design agency where he spent more than 2 years building websites for various customers and growing into a project manager in the process. At the same time, he continued freelancing for separate customers and participating in a few sole proprietorship companies in the area of web development and services. From April 2008, Eugene worked as a web developer and a technical support at ExpoPromoter, a company leading in the tradeshow industry, providing for a large catalog of tradeshow organizers across the world.
Finally, in January 2010, Eugene entered Varien Inc., which was later on rebranded as Magento Inc., as a software engineer, but lately became a Technical Trainer. When Magento was acquired by X.commerce, an eBay company, in August 2011, Eugene became a training manager responsible for providing technical knowledge for all X.commerce employees.
Eugene speaks Russian, Ukrainian, and English. He likes to read science fiction books, admire fine arts, and loves to draw pictures in particular by himself.
Karen Kilroy is a freelance e-commerce web developer focused on the Magento Community and Enterprise implementations and theming. Karen has worked as a frontend and backend developer on a variety of Magento projects since early 2009. She is an enthusiastic instructor and developer who enjoys experimenting with HTML5, CSS3, and responsive web designs. She is also an instructor and course author for Magento U. Additionally, Karen is the sole inventor of an e-commerce process called Shared Shopping (United States Patent Pending 13/350,321).
Prior to working with Magento, Karen worked with a wide variety of web and other technologies during her more than 25 years' information technology career. In her spare time, Karen volunteers as head coach of the Dragon Dream Team, an all-breast cancer survivor dragon boat racing crew.