New development teams in Kentico
Our company is growing together with our product. I just want to briefly introduce our new teams so you know who is best to talk to about particular topics.
Hi there,
As you might noticed in the past several years (actually from the very beginning), our company is constantly growing. We keep hiring new talented people to have enough resources to be able to implement all your feedback and keep Kentico CMS up-to-date with the latest market trends. This allows us to implement the best CMS in the world for you.
It all started with a single person, Petr Palas who started the company. Then he hired some external developers, which actually didn't work out very well. So he hired 3 in-place developers, one of which was myself.
I quickly became team leader and started to have my own vision of the product in terms of technology and architecture of the product, we hired some more people, including the team leaders (which you already know from our blogs), testers, support staff and also a full-time technical writer. This I see as a turning point from a garage-company to an organized and professional CMS vendor. That was around versions 2.x of Kentico CMS.
As we grow and hire new people, the most talented developers are usually becoming team leaders. You could see that when our new teams of Dominik Pinter and Juraj Hrinik were introduced during the last two years. This actually works very well, because there are always most experienced people behind every module of the solution to maintain its quality and progress of its development.
In the past several days, we again established new teams and divided their competences to be able to grow our development resources now and in future. It is my pleasure to introduce you all our current team leaders. I am pretty sure that you already know most of the new ones as senior developers that help you with various aspects of your projects time to time.
You may also notice that some of the
Technical Leaders have become
Group Product Managers for particular areas. This means that they will also focusing on gathering feedback and doing more market research to make sure particular areas are constantly improving in the right direction.
Dominik Pinter (Group Product Manager / SaaS and Cloud)
He is our expert on Cloud technologies and security. His team constantly delivers a lot of improvements that help us grow in terms of scalability on a hardware level, and high security and availability for enterprise-class projects. He always looks forward to implement new technologies. Being a security expert, he watches the trends in internet threats and makes sure that our solution provides means to prevent them in a timely manner.
His personal focus is on anything related to search engines. From Lucene.NET integration in our Smart search module to best practices and options for SEO. He is the right guy to answer technical details about these topics. But not only that. Being very experienced, he and his team is behind most of the aspects of our Portal engine and URL rewriting. Almost anything related to live site development models is their work. His team is now already focusing more on the extension of the development models and productivity of the web site designers as you can see with the new features of v7.
One of our new team leaders. He is taking over the technical aspects of our E-commerce solution from Petr Vozak who you already know. He has proven to be an experienced professional in this area capable of handling this. Similar to Juraj Hrinik during last year summer, he is now also leading a special team of talented students working on new E-commerce features side-by-side with finalizing v7.
His main focus is on features related to the document engine (and content management in general), workflow and general features that you can see throughout the whole solution. He is the guy behind content staging, object versioning, import/export and integration bus, which all use the very same concept of generalized objects, but provide various functionality. Some of these features will move to our new core focused team.
His personal focus is on mobile application development, mainly for Android platform. He also likes to work on WYSIWYG editor and jQuery (well, anything related to Javascript). He is our expert in that area. He also focuses on features related to social networking and intranets as you can see with the Chat module so you will see more improvements in this area from his team as well. So far, he is also the guy behing our upgrade and hotfix tools, but this responsibility will move to our new tools team in future.
Besides being a CTO, I have a small team on my own. This allows me to maintain the core of the system and organize the architecture so it is unified and we can leverage it to enhance the overall possibilities of the solution. This includes finding ways how to make customization more comfortable for everyone. Being busy with management of the whole development department, I am also moving some of these items to other teams as you will learn in a few moments which allows me to also be in position of
Group Product Manager / Platform.
You usually don't see this guy on our blogs or events but you may recognize him as a former senior support engineer. During the development of version 7 he started his own team focused on development of the sample web sites. Their first output in v7 is the new sample E-commerce site and you will see more re-designed or new sample sites from them in future. His team is also closest to the real-world usage of our platform, because their work is very similar to the work of our clients, so they are providing us with early feedback on usability of the new features.
Implementation of the web site is not only about designing it, but also about installation, deployment, solution structure, upgrades, imports of extrernal data and other actions provided by external tools. That is why we want to focus more on these things. We have established a new team which main goal is to improve these areas. You may know Petr Svihlik as one of our senior developers and also the author of our AD Import Tool. He likes to work on things like these so he is the best person to manage this area.
Petr Vozak (Group Product Manager / E-commerce)
Because we plan to have more than one E-commerce teams in future, Petr Vozak passed the team management part of his job to Jakub Oravec, and he will be oveseeing the the future enhancements to our E-commerce solution. He will focus more on the market research and collecting feedback from you to make sure our E-commerce evolves the right way in future.
He is one of our experts focused on low-level generic code. He is one of those geeks that became friendly with programming very early in his life. Even he is quite young, he has a great deal of real-world experience. That allowed him to quickly take over the responsibilities for our K# macro engine as well as work on other non-visual things such as REST or XLIFF integration. You won't see much user interface from him but you can be sure that lots of internal code powering the features you are already using come from him. He is also one of our new team leaders and he is taking over about half of the core functionality from my team to further work on it, and also those general purpose features from team of Jaroslav Kordula I mentioned in future.
A guy that you probably already know as our On-line marketing expert in terms of implementation (he is not a marketer). Because the whole EMS and On-line marketing has still lot of space for improvements, we split the original team of Zdenek Strach into two teams, one fully focused on EMS and one partially focused on EMS. Vitezslav and his team will continue taking care about the general On-line marketing features and all things related to Contact Management module which is already his main focus.
Zdenek and his team is keeping the two important parts of On-line marketing they originally authored which covers On-line forms and E-mails, because both are built on more general features which are part of the core of the system: Form engine and E-mail engine. They will be also focusing more on the core in terms of general UI concepts and UI components so you can expect more advanced UI components in future.
I am sure that you will learn more from them as you talk to them, I just wanted to give you a high-level overview of our new teams that you will meet in future.
As you can see, we have devoted more resources also to the core itself, that is because we want to focus more on the productivity of developers, user experience in general and also lowering the overall footprint of the solution by refactoring some things. Version 8 will be much more focused on these areas than the previous versions, because we have now focused on a lot of new features, but the existing ones also need improvement. Same with our E-commerce solution, we want to focus on it as well.
Should you feel that we are not focusing enough on some important area, let us know, together with some specific details.
We have also updated our Tree for Bugs chart statistics with those new teams so it is more accurate:
http://trees.kentico.com/Home
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