Who We Are

Thirdparty Labs is a group of seasoned web developers. We share a passion for art and technology, and strive to create solutions that are elegant in both form and function. Our multi-disciplinary backgrounds give us the unique ability to maintain full perspective on all aspects of a project at all times; considering standards, functionality, and usability during the design phase, and user experience while coding. We love what we do, and approach each project with enthusiasm and commitment.

Rob Ruchte, CTO
Rob is a second generation propellerhead. Raised by a computer science professor and a technical writer, Rob spent his formative years basking in the glow of monochrome CRTs. While his friends were playing Pong on the Atari, Rob was dialed into the Wake County Public Schools VAX mainframe playing Zork. Not much has changed since then. Rob has been building interactive web sites since 1997, and has been involved in the development of applications for fortune 500 firms including FirstUnion/Wachovia, Cable & Wireless, DuPont, and GlaxoSmithKline. While Rob is a PHP/MySQL evangelist, he is fluent in most of todays (and yesterday's) programming languages. With a logical problem solving approach and thorough knowledge of internet technology, Rob builds solutions that work.

Lee Coltrane, Partner
Lee is a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy: if it has software, firmware, or moving parts, he can tell you how it works -- if it doesn't work he can tell you why, and show you how to fix it. Self-taught from the start, Lee took his first programming job at age 14, building plugins for a local producer of CAD software. A few years later, after taking time for a formal education in electrical engineering, he began his career as a software engineer and system architect for a consulting firm servicing a variety of fortune 500 companies. In this capacity, he designed and built massively distributed, large-scale client-server systems, with applications ranging from online banking, to low-level integration of legacy mainframe applications. In the 13 years since then, Lee has established himself as a guru of all things software, specializing in the intricacies of object oriented design, and high-performance server coding. Today, he applies his expertise wherever elegant design and deeply technical implementation skills are required. When he's not writing code or designing software, you might find him flying a small airplane off a grass airstrip; or in the robotics shop at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, where he helps high school students design and build advanced robotics as part of a NASA-sponsored design and engineering competition.

Jon Williams, Partner
Jon is an owner, designer, and programmer at shovemedia. His skills in Flash, Java, and XML helped ioResearch win the award for technical merit at the 2001 Flash Forward Film Festival in New York City. Independent since 2005, shovemedia handles Flash development for clients large and small, local and remote.