Featured Techie: Truman Leung

[Daniel Leuck]

I can't say enough good things about Truman. His
Ascribe SaaS church management application is an incredible feat for a single programmer. Its slick,
feature rich and increasingly popular. We would wish him luck with Ascribe, but he doesn't need it. Truman has the brains and the work ethic to make it happen. We would like to thank Truman for his many contributions to TechHui and for organizing the
Jelly Coworking Group. It is with pleasure that we announce Truman Leung as September's Featured Techie. --- Despite a lifelong love of computers and science fiction, Truman Leung did not consider computer science as a major in college because he didn’t think he could endure days and days on end in front of a computer screen. So he got a BA and MA from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Speech, focusing on survey-based quantitative social science research of human communication. His masters thesis, “Eight Conflict Handling Styles: Validation of Model and Instrument,” was published in the
Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. In 2000, Truman made a radical career shift. He quit his job promoting international education at nonprofit Pacific and
Asian Affairs Council and began earnestly studying web technology. He poured over many books on HTML, PHP, Javascript and MySQL. Within four months, he landed his first project to work on New Hope Christian Fellowship Oahu’s website and later was tapped by the church to develop a custom web-based membership database. At that time in 2002, there were no church management software (ChMS)
companies were offering a web-based product. So Truman began developing one called
Ascribe. Frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Symfony and CakePHP did not yet exist, so he developed a custom PHP framework upon which he built Ascribe. Today, Ascribe is a feature-rich web application which integrates both member and website management into a single, powerful web-based solution. With Ascribe a church can empower each ministry with online tools to manage information, assign tasks, print labels, send email and build community. Ascribe also allows a church to distribute tax-deductible statements via the web by creating a private members area on their website. Ascribe’s content management features allows a church to publish webpages, calendars, photos, blogs & custom forms. Web hosting and unlimited email accounts are included. Feel free to take a look at working demo of
Ascribe (username: guest, password: aloha). Ascribe Data Systems is a
Software as a Service (SaaS) company which provides Ascribe along with email and web hosting to approximately thirty churches and organizations located both in Hawaii, the mainland U.S. and Australia via a monthly subscription. Ironically, although Truman once didn’t think he could endure perpetual day-long coding sessions, he’s spent almost all of the last eight years doing just that and loving it. However he looks forward to moving more into an executive role focusing on marketing, search engine optimization, blogging and leadership. He also hopes to one day make use of his Speech degrees and do some public speaking.