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Get to know the Team: Arantor

Started by Gruffen, January 11, 2010, 10:19:32 PM

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Gruffen

Well, we figured it was about time we told you a little about ourselves, and so here I am writing the first of our Get To Know The Team blog posts.

Before this post, we've covered other details in our news and announcements, we mentioned what we're doing as a project and what SimpleDesk will do, so a little more from us won't hurt. ;)

Well, for a short-and-sweet bio, my get to know me topic from Simple Machines' own community will cover that, but I'd like to just waffle on a bit more (mumbling something about privileges! ;D)

As that topic says, I'm Pete "Arantor" Spicer, former Customizer of SMF, and currently the lead developer on SimpleDesk.

I'm a proud British guy, 26, which makes me older than a significant amount of both the SMF and SimpleDesk teams (in fact I think I'm the oldest person on the SD team)

I first found SMF nearly 4 years ago for an open source development project, which due to time and commitment it sort of stagnated, but the things I learned about setting it up meant that any time I ever wanted a forum again I'd come back to SMF, and in early 2009 I started developing an online RPG (which is still under development) based on SMF's code.

Because it was deeper than anything I ever had had to do with SMF before, I quickly dived into the code and got to know it better - around that time I started to write SMF mods, and as the weeks and months went by and I knew SMF's code better, I found myself answering problems on the forum - which got me to understand SMF yet better.

As the new year dawned, I found myself wanting to do a mod bigger than anything I'd done before, bigger than anything that would be feasible just by myself, and I started canvassing for ideas in the SMF team's chat room. Seems I wasn't alone in wanting to do something bigger and bolder than ever before - Nas and JBlaze expressed a similar sentiment, and we'd all been involved in each others' smaller mods before, so we were familiar with each others' coding styles, not to mention all familiar with SMF.

For me, I want to use this project not only to craft an excellent mod for many different users, but to develop my skills - regular users of my mods will no doubt be familiar with the notion that I'm not a UI expert, and that user interface is often lacking a little in my mods - they work, and work well, but often aren't so user friendly. So I'm trying to develop my UI skills here. I'm also wanting to try and shake some bad habits I have about working in a team framework - a better SVN commit rhythm, development of leadership skills, especially in the art of delegation(!), and just generally being able to work more in a team mindset and less in an individual mindset.

So, there in a nutshell is me, and why I'm here.

As for my role here, I'm the Lead Developer. What that ultimately means for SimpleDesk is that I look after not only the code itself and the general style we take in development, I'm ultimately responsible for things getting implemented and bugs getting fixed - whether I do that myself or I oversee the Developer team perform that.

I'm also responsible for setting the feature list - we have a long list of features, and certainly what is going into 1.0 and 1.1 is set pretty much in stone for now as well as the schedules we'd like to ideally launch those releases on.

It's been a busy few days as you can imagine, setting out the plans for SD's development, but having set out the road ahead, it quickly became time to settle down and make with the magic.

Already the foundations are there - the display of helpdesk tickets, the overall helpdesk homepage, showing all the tickets that need to be responded to, and we (the Developers) are hard at work on moving towards 1.0 - I'm currently building the grunt code, Nas is crafting the user experience code, and JBlaze has been taking care of the forum admin's control panel.

And with that, I'm going to get back to the current feature I'm implementing - the ability to assign topics to users! Please do enjoy your stay on our humble home :)

cσσкιє мσηѕтєя

Nice little read, Pete. :)
It's been a pleasure working with you so far.

Gruffen

It's been a pleasure thus far for me too, Nas - let's see if we can keep it that way :)

FreeMe

you dont exist without a pic of you :P

Gruffen

That's clearly my (not really mine) super smart cat I'm playing chess with :P

I gotta get an updated pic of mine and post it here, haven't I?

cσσкιє мσηѕтєя

Quote from: Arantor on January 13, 2010, 06:34:12 PM
I gotta get an updated pic of mine and post it here, haven't I?

Yes. NAO!

[FailSafe]

I'm excited to see the rest of the Staff here put up more of these threads. ;) *hint hint*

cσσкιє мσηѕтєя


~DS~

"I was given the wardrobe of a nobleman, and so I played the part, a puppet ever dancing for the amusement of patrons unseen. This wretched world does not reward endeavour. It is the patron and his troupe who are receipt, maggots grown fat on endeavour's corpse. Most men but play the part they're given. Most live and die not knowing they play a part at all. But I am past all that now. I am their unwitting puppet no longer! No more! I will extract from them the price of their gluttonous feast! ~ Delita Heiral

Sabre

I always enjoy reading your posts Pete.
Cheers :)

Gruffen

Quote from: [FailSafe] on January 16, 2010, 02:47:56 PM
I'm excited to see the rest of the Staff here put up more of these threads. ;) *hint hint*

Well, Nas posted today :D

Sabre - thanks! I try to keep them enjoyable when I'm not being informative :)

MultiformeIngegno

Nice read!! ;)
I'm going to read the Nas one!
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hadesflames

* hadesflames continues spamming to get rid of the verification XD

So what have you been up to lately in respect to the development of SD?
*will add something eventually*

Gruffen

Quote from: hadesflames on February 19, 2010, 10:01:11 PM
So what have you been up to lately in respect to the development of SD?

Mostly finding out that I change one thing and something else breaks. Right now I haven't got my head round it fully about how it works. That and the fact that I've done almost zero coding in the last three days...

nathanael.lee

Seemed that here would be another chatting and sharing room for members of this team. So nice place for satisfying my eyes and reading demand. Thank you Arantor.