We’re excited to officially announce we’ve expanded the Core Team. This is big news for us – after years of keeping the Core Team „in-house” we eventually decided to make this bold step and expand it externally within our community.
First things first, Sylius was an Open Source project from the very beginning and our community was always crucial to us. If we moved back in time to the first Core Team, you’d see it brought people from all around the world to develop and maintain the Sylius project.
Once the company behind the project was created, it was natural that the decision making gravity would be in the inside. It overlapped with the original Core Team changes of focus and moving away from the project itself.
The current Sylius Core Team has been working within the same company for quite a time already. While this is super convenient for day-to-day work, it has become a kind of boundary between us and our community. Not everything was communicated clearly, some decisions were not obvious for people following our product. In addition, we also felt that some input from the outside of our bubble could be super valuable. In the meantime, some of the community members have shown extra engagement and involvement, which made them obvious candidates for extending the Core Team.
One of the breaking points that led to growing the Core Team within the community was the last year’s departure of one of Sylius most talented architects – Kamil Kokot. Working side by side was a fantastic experience, and we’re absolutely grateful for the time together. Kamil, we wish you exciting challenges along your professional path and hopefully lots of beer toasts still ahead of us.
So, it took us some time to reorganise and redistribute all the tasks and roles from the very beginning. And yes, the Core Team needed more people on board. To be honest, at some point we felt we were chasing our own tails and it had to change. As the Core Team takes responsibility for the whole Open Source project, we wanted to give the community much more than we were actually able to. It was when we decided to recruit the best possible Core Team Members – the ones already contributing to Sylius.
We’ve got three new Core Team Members since mid-December, so some of you must have already seen their activity around Sylius/Sylius PR’s. They had an energetic start in review, taking up the pull requests dropped by us due to not enough manpower. Now, we can process everything much faster and we can process more, so that’s an obvious benefit for the whole Sylius community.
So – “who are they?” – you’d probably ask right now 🙃.
Loic has been a prolific contributor for years, so his candidacy has come as an organic first call. He’s been developing a project based on Sylius components and bundles called Monofony, which proves Sylius Stack value for non-commerce challenges. That being said, he is an expert in the development of two most powerful Sylius bundles – Resource and Grid, proving there’s no thing on the earth that could not be developed with them.
To give you some more context on Loic’s work at Sylius repositories just look here and there.
The second invitation to the Core Team that we have sent out was also obvious. You know this man very well from our Slack’s #support channel – he even has his own emoji often used as an appreciation of his endless help and plenty of good advice. Last year, as a Tech Lead, he joined BestValue, one of the longest standing (since 2015!) Sylius store.
He prefers operating from the shadows, so we won’t be spilling his name here, although by his PR’s you’ll know him 😎.
He describes himself as “PHP web developer, Symfony lover and Sylius addict”, and it – pretty much – explains his contribution to Sylius. Yes, it is abundant :). Stephane works at Locastic, one of first Sylius Solution Partners and long-term open source friends. He is also in the dev team of our Sylius Plus customers – Netenders. Apart from contributing to Sylius repositories, Stephane has also freelanced as Sylius coach, and soon he will provide official training and consulting services in France. Most recently, he has kickstarted his Twitch live streams of… Sylius plugins development.
Welcome on board guys!
Apart from expanding outside of Sylius, we’re also growing within the organization. Taking advice from your feedback, in Q4 2021 we hired 6 new developers (2 juniors, 3 mids, and 1 senior) that you should get to know this quarter from their contributions. We also got down to optimizing work (read this post).
There’s a new channel at Sylius Community Slack – #community-pulse where the most engaged community members share their ideas, feedback, and suggestions in order to make Sylius development gr…now come on, it’s always been great, let’s say even better 🙂
With 3 new core team members, we have already felt some wind under our wings. PR’s review moves forward and we really hope you, as community members, notice it as well. We are hoping to publish the long-term product vision in the nearest future, so our roadmap could be more clear to you.
What is more, we are still looking for more people to energize product and Community management, so make sure to contact us if you love Sylius as we do and think that you want to contribute to our mutual growth!
