Asha Dornfest is the founder and publisher of Parent Hacks, a site devoted to parents' scrappy, real-world tips and product recommendations.

Starting a blog was a natural outgrowth of Asha's background in writing and technology. Before the Web was in popular use and well before kids, she and her husband Rael started a "Web design" business. In the early 90s, if you knew HTML, you were practically a Web designer by default. From there, Asha went on to write several computer how-to manuals, including "For Dummies" titles about Web publishing.

After her kids were born, her interest and writing inspiration turned to parenting, not because she felt a sense of expertise - in fact, just the opposite. Parenting was the first endeavor Asha undertook in which "reading the manual" had no effect, and, in some cases, made things harder. She started Parent Hacks as a place where parents could find those priceless tidbits of "worked for me" parenting advice one usually stumbled upon by chance, stuff that rarely showed up in the "expert" parenting manuals lining her bookshelves. Along the way, she discovered a generous and smart community of parents all of whom understand that when enough of us throw a bit of wisdom into the pot, it gets easier for all of us.

Asha is the mother of two children (an eight-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter), and the wife of a "charming and brilliant geek". They live in Portland, Oregon.