Orchard - About Us (original) (raw)

About Us

The Orchard team is a group of developers who are passionate about delivering open source solutions on .NET technology. But it's not just the core team: Orchard is driven forward by lot of occasional contributors too.

Steering Committee

Bertrand Le Roy

Bertrand Le Roy | Chief Scientist Developer

Bertrand started his professional developer career in 1982 when he published his first video game. He then spent a few years studying math and physics, got a Ph.D. and then went back to software development. He released in 2002 what was probably the first CMS to run on ASP.NET. A year later, he was hired by Microsoft’s ASP.NET team and moved to the US. He has worked on ASP.NET versions 2.0 to 4.0, ASP.NET Ajax, contributed to making jQuery an official part of the .NET developer’s tool chest and represented Microsoft in the OpenAjax Alliance’s steering committee. He is now a Program Manager on the .NET CLR team. In his spare time, he’s a gamer, a pretty good skier, a very mediocre golfer and he wonders who really reads bios.

Piotr Szmyd

Piotr Szmyd | Complexity Developer

Piotr started his programming adventure as a kid somewhere in the 90’s. Although being in love with computers, he went to study medicine on Warsaw Medical University. He also started pursuing his BSc degree in CS on Warsaw University in parallel, so not to lose touch with programming. Since then, he’s been using .NET as his platform of choice working on web-based projects for different companies. In 2010 he came across a barely known project called Orchard… And he’s been utilizing it in every day work since then. In his spare time, besides doing OSS work, Piotr enjoys travelling, photography, playing the guitar and cooking experiments.

Sebastien Ros

Sipke Schoorstra

Sipke Schoorstra | Awesome Developer

Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Timezone: GMT+1 | iDeliverable | Blog: http://www.ideliverable.com/blog | Twitter: @sfmskywalker

Sipke grew up in a small town in The Netherlands called Bergen with his 8 bit NES and 16 bit SNES consoles. Inspired by games like Mario, Zelda, Mystic Quest and Secret Of Mana, he knew that he wanted to create games himself and so he started drawing heroes, dragons, elves and trees. But he wanted more and eventually sold his game consoles in order to be able to purchase a PC with Klik & Play and Macromedia Director and started to learn scripting and soon started a multimedia study in Amsterdam. During this period he moved on to C++ and DirectX. A year later a software shop invited him to come work with them and thus became a professional developer. Since then, he has worked for a variety of companies, building a vast range of .NET applications, including for the web, desktop, servers, and embedded systems. In 2003 he started as a freelance consultant and developed a new slick new CMS along the way, which is now long rotten and dead. During that time he found out how hard it actually is to maintain and evolve a CMS all by oneself, so he started looking for open source CMS. Being in love with MVC, he was excited when he found out about Oxite, but mesmerized when he found out about Orchard. To this very day Orchard is all he talks about.

In his spare time, Sipke enjoys reading, blogging, jogging, working on personal projects and dreaming about his next killer RPG.

Zoltán Lehóczky

Former Steering Committee Members

Ylan Kunstler

Ylan Kunstler | Humanizer, Community Manager

Location: Los Angeles, CA | Timezone: GMT-8 | BigCommerce | Twitter: @ylank | LinkedIn: ylankunstler

Ylan is the founder and producer of the Orchard Harvest conferences. He is a major Orchard framework advocate and currently serves as an Orchard Community Board member. His current mission is to bring together Orchard enthusiasts and to foster community building around the globe as well as play a major role in developing the Orchard product roadmap.

In addition to his involvement with Orchard, Ylan currently leads the new product platform development team at Onestop - a full-service technology company that provides e-commerce, multichannel, and interactive marketing solutions for its Client partners.

As an active member of the tech community, Ylan is always looking to leverage his network to assist other Start Up entrepreneurs and technologists who simply dare to try!

Core Developers

Benedek Farkas

Benedek Farkas | Chronicler, Localization Manager

Location: Budapest, Hungary | Timezone: GMT+1 | Lombiq Technologies Ltd. Twitter: @FarkasBenedek | LinkedIn: benedekfarkas

Benedek shows interest in IT since the year of 6, when he joined an after-school computer class during the first year of elementary school. His interest got more serious (and then became a passion) during secondary school and since then he honed his skills on various courses both offline and online, including studying Computer Science (and then also teaching Orchard development) at Óbuda University in Hungary.

A huge leap for him was to get involved with Orchard and the open-source mentality in 2011, which eventually led to co-founding Lombiq, a company focused on providing all kinds of Orchard services.

Benedek was a speaker at two Orchard Harvest conferences so far and is responsible for recording and publishing the weekly podcasts to make sure that the latest news about our favourite CMS reach everyone. He also manages and maintains the Crowdin localization projects of Orchard and he's occasionally hunting and squashing Orchard bugs too.

Daniel Stolt

Daniel Stolt

Location: Gothenburg, Sweden | Timezone: GMT+1 | IDeliverable, Ltd. | Blog: http://www.ideliverable.com/blog/author/daniel | Twitter: @DanielStolt

Daniel has absolutely no formal education in computer science, or even one shred of evidence to support claims that he knows anything about software engineering, but has somehow managed to survive (maybe even thrive) as a software developer for his entire carreer. As a hobby, however, computer programming been front and center in his life since the age of 7 when he started manually typing in BASIC game listings into his Commodore 64 from computer magazines.

After having spent a few years doing classic ASP and VB6, ever since the first public beta of Microsoft .NET saw the light of day Daniel has been teaching, preaching, living and breathing it. About a decade later Microsoft Azure assumed a similar role in his life alongside .NET - Daniel is an avid advocate and true believer of cloud computing.

Daniel got into Orchard development by accident in 2012, and has since been making contributions. He is to blame for such things as custom calendar support, improvements to Azure integration, the Orchard.Azure.MediaServices module, the Orchard.AuditTrail module, and the client-side part of the Orchard.Layouts module.

He also enjoys referring to himself in the third person in obviously and blatantly self-authored bios... ;)

Nicholas Mayne

Nicholas Mayne

Location: London, UK | Timezone: GMT | Blog: http://themayneissue.com/ | Twitter: @NicholasMayne

Nick started programming as a kid on a BBC Basic computer from the age of 6 and grew up on DOS when his dad brought home a 286. He then went to university some years later to study Software Engineering, and in 2005 he started his professional career. His open source interest actually started when he came across a code dump on Codeplex in December 2009 from a little known project called Orchard. In his spare time he enjoys travelling, playing football and watching way too many movies.

Antoine Griffard

Stanley Goldman