Dev introduction: Brion Vibber

Originally posted to statusnet-dev mailing list last week.

Hi all --

As Evan announced a couple weeks ago, I'm joining StatusNet as senior architect to lead development as we push towards the 1.0 release and formal launch of hosting services on status.net. I've been poking around in Laconica/StatusNet code and on this list for quite some time, but I thought I'd go ahead and introduce myself a little more formally!

So who is this Brion Vibber guy? I'm a free/open software developer living in San Francisco, California with my wife Marti and two cats who are very jealous of the attention my laptop gets.

I've spent the last few years leading development on Wikipedia's MediaWiki engine first as a volunteer developer, then as CTO at the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm really looking forward to applying my experience building high-scale buzzword-compliant LAMP web 2.0 social software to a new project, and I'm always *very* happy to have the chance to work on something I use myself every day!

Trivia:

• first Linux distro: Slackware (installed from floppies!)
• favorite desktop OS: Mac OS X (as long as I've got an Ubuntu virtual
  machine...)
• favorite Unix text editor: joe (go WordStar keybindings!)
• favorite beer: Guinness (bribes are accepted and encouraged)

Today's my first official day on the job for StatusNet... over the next couple weeks I'll mainly be exploring and documenting the current state of things to get a deeper understanding of how all the code goes together and what's it's going to take to get us to 0.9, 1.0, and beyond.

In particular I'd like to start making more use of the wiki for documentation and planning; since the pages were migrated off of Trac a couple months ago it's easier to handle, and we can start customizing it more to make it easier to work with. I've started some code documentation pages on the wiki including stub pages generated from the class tree and the beginnings of some deeper dives on particular code paths:

Definitely let me know about any ideas or suggestions for improving the wiki or other parts of the coding process -- tighter integration with mublogging notifications, our bug tracking, etc could be really interesting as well as just general things to improve the look & feel or workflow.

Particular areas I'm interested in pushing on include:

• speeding up how we categorize and handle bug reports & feature reqs
• unit testing & automated UI and API regression tests
• a good solid admin control panel
• debugging aids
• scaling & performance
• new awesome UI features

I should be pretty reachable online during west coast working hours, though my exact schedule may vary until I find the best hours to work with everybody. On irc.freenode.net you'll find me as 'brion' in #statusnet and of course you can always dent me!

For those of us still fond of our 1970s-era protocols, my @status.net email isn't set up yet but brion at pobox.com should always reach me... (Update: brion at status.net now works.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Senior architect, StatusNet
San Francisco