James Duncan Davidson (born July 29, 1970 in Lubbock, Texas) is an American photographer and former software developer. While a software engineer at Sun Microsystems (1997–2001), Davidson created Tomcat, a Java‐based webserver application and the Ant Java‐based build tool.
He was raised in Oklahoma and Texas, and is currently self‐employed as both a software consultant and a photographer. He is a resident of Portland, Oregon.
James has in the recent past (2005–2006) turned his programming interests and attention in the direction of Ruby on Rails. In tandem with well‐known Rails guru Mike Clark, Davidson has designed and built some of the most complex and robust early Rails applications.
Starting in 2005, James' primary professional focus shifted to photography. He has served as the primary event photographer at several high-profile technology conferences. In February 2009, he served as a photographer at the TED conference.
He is co-founder and co-owner (with Greg Koenig) of Luma Labs, a small company in Portland, OR focused on making quality camera accessories.
Famous quotes containing the words james, duncan and/or davidson:
“Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.”
—William James (1843–1916)
“This was once
a city among men, a gathering together of spirit.
It was measured by the Lord and found wanting.”
—Robert Duncan (b. 1919)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)