If you’re a listener of the Voices of the ElePHPant podcast, you’ve probably already spotted the latest episode where Cal interviewed me about Joind.in and the experiences I’ve had with making to open source and the challenges associated with it. Unfortunately, the podcast was only a few minutes long and wasn’t a good forum for me to thank the folks that have helped to make the project into what it is today. As I mentioned in the recording, I knew to make the site all it could be, I needed to open it and share it with other minds greater than mine.

So, here’s a few thanks to some of the folks that have made an impact on the project:

• Lorna Mitchell

  Honestly, without Lorna, a co-lead on the project, things wouldn’t be where they are today. She is one of the very first contributors to the project and was around back when the code was hosted on my own SVN server. She’s been the one that has waded through my early code and has helped point out the broken parts and encourage work on the features we agreed would be best to have. Her involvement with the project has grown considerably ever since php|tek last year and she’s become an invaluable part of the project.

  Because of her busy schedule, we’ve moved into different roles in the project that play more to our strengths. She, the always outgoing, willing to talk to anyone person she is, has taken up championing the project to anyone who will sit still long enough to listen. Some of the sessions she’s given have even included Joind.in as an integral part. In fact, she has a talk coming up at Dutch PHP Conference that’s about the new version of the Joind.in API she’s been hard at work on. Oh, and not to be forgotten, she also pushed the bug tracking for the project off of Github and onto Jira – a major upgrade to the bug tracking abilities of the project. The project is lucky to have her as a lead.

• Kathryn Reeve

  Kathryn has been one of the few that’s voluntarily tackled the Javascript for the project. The changes she’s made won’t jump out at you when you visit the site, but they’ve
  helped to make the site more stable and more usable. She’s recently been working on date picker update for all of the date fields on the site and has made the tabs on the
  event page more accessible via the URL.

• Joshua Thijssen

  Joshua’s a relatively new developer to the project, but he’s the kind open source projects love. He’s the kind of guy that dives head-first into code and doesn’t look back. I’m
  not completely sure, but I think that in the first week he was involved in the project, he closed about 10 bugs single-handedly. He’s active in both the IRC channel
  (#joind.in on irc.freenode.net) and in the bug tracker, both in providing suggestions and in closing out issues. Joshua is also the creator of the Android Joind.in application (which he gave a presentation on at the 4Developers conference).

• Kevin Bowman

  Kevin’s been involved in the project for quite a while with contributions that range from server-side work, code updates, conversations on the mailing list and his most visible
  contribution, the iPhone application. This app, along with the Android one, are widely used at conferences for those times when it’s just easier to get out a phone than
  a laptop. He’s a great asset to have around for some of the more technical bits and I’m thankful for his continued efforts to help the project grow.

• Mike van Riel

  Mike has been another one of those developers that’s extremely eager to help. Some of his latest work has helped bring the project more up to a unified coding standard.
  He and Michelangelo van Dam also laid the foundation for the unit testing functionality that the site currently uses (as well as some additional debugging handling). Before that
  he contributed loads of bug fixes.

I could go on and on with a list of folks that have helped out the project in one way or another, but here’s a few more of the thanks I want to send out…thank you to Jeremy Kindall, Derick Rethans, Stefan Koopmanschap, Ryan Mauger, Michelangelo van Dam and Rob Allen. I know there’s people I’ve missed on this list – there’s a whole host of you out there that have helped promote the site and make it what it is. I am so thankful that the PHP community is as open and sharing as it is. Without it, there’s no way a project like this would have gotten much beyond its infancy.

Thanks you to all of the PHP conferences that consistently use the site for their feedback – PHPUK, php|tek, ZendCon, PHPBelenux, ConFoo, Symfony events, PHP Community Conference, Day Camp 4 Developers, phpDay, PHP Unconference Europe, Dutch PHP Conference, PHP Northwest and the PHP Brazil Conference – and to all of the user groups and other events that contribute events and show their support daily.

I personally want to thank you all for being a part of our project, and I’m looking forward to where the future will take us. 🙂