With a new schedule and regime, we changed the author introduction post to a once per three months frequency rather than every other month like it was. As March is drawing to an end (already?!), let’s see which new souls joined us in this era of peer review. We’ll also use this opportunity to mention our newest regular authors.
Regular authors are those who send in an increased number of drafts and actively engage in peer reviewing of other people’s work. They’re our most valuable community members, helping make the goals for 2015 a reality. They’re eligible for higher payments and other bonuses to come, their topics are essentially auto-approved for writing, and more. If you’d like to become a regular SitePoint author (or just an author), do send us a note.
Regular Authors
We’ve seen an influx of increased enthusiasm from our most prolific members. The first two who get to pin this medal to their chest are as follows:
Younes Rafie, Morocco
Younes has been with us for a while, and has been aiming for the regular author position since Q3 2014. When a man knows what he wants, there’s little that will stand in his way, and Younes grabbed the opportunity by the throat. In 2014, he was one of our most prolific authors and in 2015 he only increased his output, always keeping quality and interesting topics in mind. I take great pride in being able to welcome him into the regulars circle, and I feel like he’s just getting started.
So far (in 2015), Younes published a whopping six posts and two quick tips. Keep up the great work!
Daniel Sipos, Belgium
Danny has been our Drupal expert since the day he joined. If anything was going on in the Drupal world we should know about, he was right on top of it, keeping everyone up to date and preparing the readership for Drupal 8’s imminent release. Danny earned his “R” badge in March, and starting with April, he’ll be a part of the regular circle.
Danny’s contributions not only to our Drupal corprus but also to the peer review process have been invaluable. He reviewed countless articles, shot pull requests left and right, and even made important suggestions for improving the entire workflow.
Danny’s 2015 portfolio counts five posts with more incoming. Excellent work!
New Authors
Apart from the regulars increasing their output, we’ve also had room to welcome some new souls on board. They are, in order:
David Brumbaugh, USA
As per David’s bio, he is the CTO of SaaS provider 3B Alliance, LLC. He’s been involved in Internet development since 1994. His articles have been published by Dice, C/C++ User’s Journal, PC Techniques and John Wiley & Sons. David specializes in software design in PHP/mySQL, HTML/Javascript, C++ and C#/SQL Server, focused on application security, eCommerce, and WordPress plugin development.
His debut post with us was about encrypting arbitrarily large messages with asymmetric keys and phpseclib, a niche but highly interesting topic for any web security enthusiast.
Lukas Kahwe Smith, Switzerland
Lukas is a partner at Liip. His enthusiasm for the web and open source is only rivaled by his love of ultimate frisbee. He was co-release-manager for PHP 5.3. He is part of the Symfony core team, is co-leading PHPCR and Symfony CMF and has contributed to various parts of the Doctrine project.
Lukas wrote a very interesting piece about content organization in CMS where he pitted trees, tags, references and facets against each other. While not exactly PHP related, it’s an incredibly informative read about an age old problem most high-traffic content managers encounter sooner or later. If you’re running a high profile content site (or plan to), I do suggest you give this piece a look.
Lukas has only published the single post with us so far, but we hope to see more of his work.
Christophe Willemsen, Belgium
Christophe worked as a Software Engineer for almost 15 years in maritime industries and at the NATO. He is now a Neo4j Expert and trainer at GraphAware, the #1 Neo4j consulting partner. Among eating graphs every day, he likes to develop applications with Symfony components or the full stack framework.
Christophe originally got in touch with us to write about Neo4j and graph databases – topics on our channel that have been left far too untouched for my liking. Naturally, he was welcomed with open arms and immediately produced an excellent two-part series on building a social network application with Neo4j and Silex. The first part is a down-to-earth explanation of graph databases and their interaction with PHP in general, while the second part dives into application development and adds friending to a Silex skeleton.
Christophe is currently working on more graph-related content for us, so stay tuned!
Shivam Mamgain, India
Shivam is a web developer, competitive programmer, casual gamer and blogger. Having noticed a severe lack of SQLite topics on our channel, Shivam decided it was time to change this and got in touch. The result was a post about SQLite’s basic commands, laying the foundation for more advanced content which will be coming soon.
Daniel Berman, Israel
Daniel, a product evangelist at Zend, joined us late in March with a top ten list of appealing Z-Ray features. This introductory post is a warmup for more in depth content regarding Z-Ray and the advanced debugging, optimization and insight it can offer. If you’re interested in Zend Server and the environment it can provide you with, Daniel’s posts will be of great interest to you.
Welcome, everyone! We hope you like our little family, and we do hope you’ll help us expand it further!
Conclusion
As this channel’s editor, I love it when people join up after having noticed missing content. It means they’re paying attention and are actively seeking the resources on our channel which, to me, is among the highest praises the channel could get.
What say you? Want to join us? We’re building a flexible community in which every member helps other members be better. Ping me – we’ll welcome both peer reviewers and authors, and neither position is contractual or requires a fixed or minimum amount of work – you work at your own leisure, and the more you work (as an author), the more you get paid, simple as that!
Bruno SkvorcBruno is a blockchain developer and technical educator at the Web3 Foundation, the foundation that's building the next generation of the free people's internet. He runs two newsletters you should subscribe to if you're interested in Web3.0: Dot Leap covers ecosystem and tech development of Web3, and NFT Review covers the evolution of the non-fungible token (digital collectibles) ecosystem inside this emerging new web. His current passion project is RMRK.app, the most advanced NFT system in the world, which allows NFTs to own other NFTs, NFTs to react to emotion, NFTs to be governed democratically, and NFTs to be multiple things at once.
