Meet the core team

Dancer has evolved quickly from a prototype based on the idea of porting Ruby's Sinatra to a fully featured and popular micro-framework. This has been possible thanks to a vast community of users who contributed ideas, bug reports and patches.

Time after time, some of these users appeared to be very motivated and productive and it's quite natural that a Core Team emerged.

In this article we'll present each member of the team, so you can put some faces behind the Git history and IRC users.

The core team is probably the best feature of Dancer, so please, let me introduce you to the men who make Perl dance!

Alexis Sukrieh (sukria)

1442 commits so far, first commit on Jul 17th 2009 (da6c198)

Alexis has been working in the Internet industry for more than ten years. He's always been passionate about computer programming and free software. Perl has always been the language Alexis enjoys the most, and luckily he always managed to find a paid job with Perl throughout his career.

Before creating Dancer, Alexis used to be a Debian developer and wrote a popular backup tool called Backup Manager.

In summer 2009 he started experimenting with a port of the Ruby project Sinatra in Perl, and that's how Perl Dancer was born. Alexis tried hard to build a friendly and responsive community around Dancer, he's very happy to see the project evolving by itself. Alexis now dedicates all his free time on Dancer 2, a complete rewrite of the project.

Alexis works at Weborama, a company that works in the Internet advertisement industry. When not writing Perl code or terrorizing Weborama's R&D Team, he listens to insane and loud music.

Alexis runs a blog and has a Twitter.

Sawyer X (sawyer)

581 commits so far, first one on Jan 13th, 2010 (b7cc27b)

Sawyer X has been using Perl for almost 10 years now. We works as a Perl developer and systems administrator. He is responsible for Organising TelAviv.pm meetings. Sawyer picked up Dancer after checking out several small web frameworks on CPAN. The responsiveness and kindness in the community prompted him to suggest and develop his first contribution to Dancer - a route caching system. Since then he has become a core developer, project mentor and lecturer world-wide.

He is currently the maintainer and release manager of the 1.x branch.

Franck Cuny (franck)

781 commits so far, first one on Jan 14th, 2010 (dff82bf)

Franck is passionate about graphs, code, and web technologies.

He is a software engineer working at SAY: Media, where most of his time is spent working on the platform, building services, tools, and help designing the architecture.

He is also a member of SF.pm, and was the previous organizer of Paris' technical meetings, before letting dams bringing the whole thing down.

David Precious (bigpresh)

284 commits so far, first one on Feb 11th, 2010 (b92d612)

David Precious (bigpresh) is a professional Perl developer from London, with 11 years of commercial experience working in the ISP and hosting market.

He discovered Dancer in February 2010 whilst looking for a framework which was nice to use and didn't feel awkward, contributed a few improvements and fixes, and eventually ended up with a commit bit.

Since then he's promoted the project in the Perl community, maintains the website and advent calendar, and helps improve the documentation as well as fixing bugs and adding features.

When not in front of a keyboard, he is a keen motorcyclist, plays squash, and enjoys drinking beer. Quite a lot of beer.

Damien Krotkine (dams)

172 commits so far, first commit on Sep 26th, 2010 (16ad3a9)

Damien has been using Perl since 1999. He started using Dancer in late 2010 for a small project, done in 2 days. Amazed by the ease of use, he started contributing, and got the commit bit soon after. He has worked at Mandrakesoft, Mandriva, IDM, Venda, and now Weborama. He organises the tech meeting of the Paris Perl Mongers since September 2011.

When not coding Perl, he enjoys life with his lovely wife, mainly doing rock climbing.

Alberto Simões (ambs)

426 commits so far, first commit on Dec 19th, 2010 (537c5aa).

Alberto started using Perl in 1999. He uses Perl mostly for natural language processing. He was a old school CGI programmer until he heard about Dancer in 2010's Dancer Advent Calendar. Since then he started using and patching Dancer and annoying Dancer core developers. He poked so much that he was promoted to a Dancer core developer.

Alberto was also the organizer of YAPC::EU::2005 in Braga, Portugal and YAPC::EU::2009 in Lisbon, Portugal. He is the co-founder of the Portuguese Perl Users Group, and secretary of The Perl Foundation (TPF) grants committee.

Authors

This article has been written by the core team for the Dancer Advent Calendar 2011.