I’d like to take a moment to thank all our customers for helping make 2007 an incredibly successful year for us. Our growth this year has enabled us to expand our staff in order to continue to provide great customer support, service, and of course continue to develop great products. With that, I’d like to announce two fantastic new members of our team:
Kurt Deutscher, who many will recognize from our forums, is joining us in January as Chief Technology Evangelist. Kurt has built a very successful web services company that specializes in the non-profit sector. His company holds the distinction of having built more ExpressionEngine websites than any other single company (well over 50 sites). Kurt will be stepping down from his current position in order to join our team. In his new role, Kurt will evangelize ExpressionEngine and develop training and educational resources. Kurt is one of the most passionate and positive people I know, and with his background in education and team development, he is perfectly suited to his new role.
In addition, Michael Boyink has joined our team as System Evaluator. Many of you know Michael as a long-time member of our community and Professional Network. Michael, in fact, has been building websites using our software since 2002. He’s currently the 16th most active user in our forums, so he knows a thing or two about ExpressionEngine. In his new capacity he will be working closely with our development team to test and evaluate ExpressionEngine features and capability.
We are very excited at these two new additions and look forward to their contribution to our community. To all our customers, thank you again, and have a wonderful holiday season!
Smart move, Rick! Just don’t overlook Michael Boyink’s gift for (and this was WAY overdue!) actually translating all the power and flexibility of EE into readily-understood design patterns.
Despite having built a number of sites atop EE since I moved over from pMachine Pro, I can confess that I’ve never been as confident about the product’s application to my business as I find myself after working through Michael’s recent tutorial series. I don’t post a lot, but since the first release, I’ve gone ‘round and ‘round with your documentation, the fora, your wiki and FAQ, and I’ve produced sites that I see now are a pastiche of techniques that lack any guiding architecture. The guy really made some lightbulbs go off and I hope you’ll find a way to leverage that in his new duties.
Congratulations, everyone! I’m constantly impressed at how EllisLab recognizes and supports its community’s most prolific and influential members. It feels like family.
Rick, you are an amazing GM and coach: your drafts are based on skills, dedication and good team spirit. You are the great architect of a winning team.
Congrats to all. Now the “Ellislab Facebook” has five people with the name of “chief” in their title and that doesn’t even include the VP. Geez, Leslie, I think you should demand that you can be a chief too! Lisa should even demand to be chief tech support rep. Maybe Rick should be a chief chief, or perhaps chief of chiefs, or maybe even big chief. If you did that, you would have all chiefs and no indians though. That would be 7 chiefs out of a total of 13 people. With all these chiefs and relatively few people to “chief down to” then you might have a chief mutiny on your hands!
Oh, and perhaps to encourage a bit of competition in the ranks maybe Ellislab could create a “chief Derek” position. That way instead of having to say Derek A or Derek J then we could just refer to one as Chief Derek and the other as simply Derek.
The good thing about appointing people from the community is that they can directly apply their experience and ideas to the future direction of ExpressionEngine.
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