He founded the first wiki site, the Portland Pattern Repository, in 1995. The site, which is still active, is dedicated to "people, projects, and patterns" and is an "informal history of programming ideas". For instance, the site has been used for cataloging useful pattern languages of software development and for developing the software method of extreme programming. Cunningham states that the wiki concept came to him in the late 1980s, and he implemented it first in a HyperCard stack.
He is the co-author (with Bo Leuf) of the book The Wiki Way (2001).
Ward Cunningham is a founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc He has also served as Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. Ward is well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming, and the communities hosted by his WikiWikiWeb. He is founder of the Hillside Group and has served as program chair of the Pattern Languages of Programs conference which it sponsors. Since December 2003 he works for Microsoft.
Ward Cunningham lives in Portland, Oregon.