I'm pleased to announce Matt Beckett and Juho Jaakkola are joining the team as core developers for Elgg!

Matt's name should already be familiar as a very helpful and effective Community Administrator as well as a prolific plugin and core patch author. We're excited to have him join the core team in an official capacity.

Juho has been involved with Elgg for a few years as a developer whose work can be found on the community site, GitHub, and in the developer discussion group. Read on to hear from Juho about how he plans to help improve Elgg and a bit about his other interests!

I'm a web developer from Finland. My work is mostly Elgg related but I also have some (a bit outdated) experience about Drupal, Moodle and Zend Framework. I'm enthusiastic about movies, sports and of course - Elgg. Piano playing and rock climbing also get a slice from my free time.

I got involved with Elgg through my job. At first my task was just to keep the Elgg sites up and running but it didn't take long until I started customizing the sites through plugins. Once Elgg 1.8 was released with some great improvements I really got interested in plugin development. Eventually I started making bug fixes and completely new features also to the Elgg core itself.

I'm an active plugin developer so one of my goals as a member of the team is to improve plugins from the perspective of both developers and end users. This means that plugin devs can write more powerful features with less code. Thanks to the rich set of available features the end users will also get a better user experience.

Besides working on the core I will also try to keep helping new devs on the community forums as much as possible!

--Juho

We've excited to have both Matt and Juho join the core developers!