About Obi-Wan Kimberly
Women in computing: Kimberly (left) with Telle Whitney of the Anita Borg Institute (center) and Turing Award winner Frances Allen (right).
Obi-Wan Kimberly is Kimberly Blessing: a Web developer, standards evangelist, and technology executive who has worked with numerous organizations to successfully make the transition to Web standards. This site is where she blogs about those very topics.
Kimberly has helped organizations large and small in converting their table-based markup to CSS-driven, progressively enhanced layouts. Her first experience with this was at AOL, where she led standards-compliant redesigns of AOL.COM in 2004 and 2005. She also had a hand in the 2007 redesign of PayPal, where she led the team which was responsible for driving the creation and adoption of standards. Through her consultancy, KimmieCorp, she’s helped a number of organizations do the same. Kimberly currently leads the front-end development team at Comcast Interactive Media, which produces the comcast.net site.
Kimberly has also taken her standards experience and knowledge to numerous conferences (SXSW, WebVisions, An Event Apart), the classroom, and shared it in a book: Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites. She has served on the W3C CSS Working Group and is a member and former group lead of The Web Standards Project.
A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, Kimberly is also passionate about women’s issues, including increasing the number of women in technology. She has twice served as volunteer webmistress for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
The “Obi-Wan” moniker was bestowed on Kimberly by a member of the development team at AOL, when a particularly tricky CSS issue had others stumped.
You can follow Kimberly on Twitter, connect with her on LinkedIn, or email her at obiwan at kimberly blessing dot com.