Meet the people behind Backyard Post

Newspapers and web sites are created by people, but it’s easy to forget that fact if all they ever let you see is some soulless corporate facade. Aloof and impersonal isn’t the way the Backyard Post team rolls, however. No, we prefer our corporate facade to be more warm and inviting. Soulful, even. So now that we showed you one of our cats (that was Belle featured in our previous post), it’s time for us to properly introduce ourselves. Many people at The Palm Beach Post play a role in bringing you Backyard Post, but three people in particular make pretty much a full-time job of it:

William M. Hartnett, 29, is The Post’s online innovations editor, and the shortest of the three men pictured above. (The one with the smaller, but still spectacular, of the two mustaches.) For no very good reason, he insists on being called “Mark,” his middle name, rather than Will, Bill or some other variation of his actual first name. Suspicious, no?

Mark joined The Post in 2000 as a reporter in the paper’s Martin County office, and from 2003 to 2007 he was The Post’s computer-assisted reporting specialist. Creating the foundation of real-world neighborhoods on which Backyard Post is built has been Mark’s obsession since early 2005, when he began working on what became the Mapping the Boom series.

Mark was born and raised in Bradenton, on Florida’s Gulf coast, and graduated from the University of Florida in 2000. He lives with his wife and two cats in the Canterbury Place at Abacoa neighborhood in Jupiter. Look carefully and you just might spot him slowly driving through your Palm Beach, Martin or St. Lucie County neighborhood. He’ll be the guy steering with his knees while holding a stack of maps in one hand and writing notes on an aerial photo with the other.

E-mail Mark at william_hartnett@pbpost.com, call him at (561) 820-4590, add him as a friend on Facebook, check him out at LinkedIn, review his personal site at wmhartnett.com, scrutinize his bookmarks at del.icio.us, look at pictures of his cats here and here, or, if you happen to see him in person, just shout his name, followed by your question or comment. Lastly, he wrote this post, so is it any great surprise that his bit is so ridiculously long? Why he wrote it in the third person, however, is more baffling.

Matthew Wensing, 26, grew up in West Palm Beach and graduated from the University of Chicago in 2003. After graduation, he worked as a freelance web, graphic, and print designer before joining McMaster-Carr Supply Co. as an information architect and software developer, creating navigable taxonomies for complex industrial products and writing web publishing software in Perl, XSL, and VB.NET for the company’s 3,000-plus page, 450,000-item catalog.

In the summer of 2006, he became the sixth employee and designer of failed startup OpenHive.com, a site created to facilitate the sharing of physical media through local networks. From 2006 to 2007, he co-founded weather startup Stormpulse.com, an interactive hurricane-tracking website written from scratch in ActionScript and Python. He began using Django after being hired by The Post in August 2007, and remains inspired to become a better programmer by the relentless, practical need to do more, faster.

Check out Matt’s photography (not cat-based!) at wensing-photo.com, and see his profiles on LinkedIn and Django People. E-mail him at matthew_wensing@pbpost.com.

Most importanly to Matt, he is a Christian, a husband and the father of two.

Peter Sheats, 26, was born and raised in West Palm Beach. Fans of very, very obscure trivia will no doubt be interested to know that Pete was the salutatorian of The King’s Academy graduating class of 2000. Who was the valedictorian that year? Why, our very own Matt Wensing. What are the chances, eh? (If anyone else who graduated in, say, the top 1 or 2 percent of that class happens to be employed in computer science or information technology, get in touch, because we’re apparently running some sort of alumni organization around here.)

Pete graduated from Palm Beach Atlantic University with a B.S. in computer information systems, and worked for the university for three years. Before coming to The Post late last year, he worked most recently at a local startup. Pete plays the violin, is married and has an 8-month-old son.

E-mail Pete at peter_sheats@pbpost.com.