We’d like to introduce two new members in the Nooku Team. First of all there’s Stian Didriksen, from Norway, our new javascript whiz kid. You may have heard of him: he’s one of the rising stars in the Joomla community. He is working with Prothemer on the Morph template engine, and with Ninjaforge on the Ninjaboard forum extension.

While Stian was working on the alpha version of Ninjaboard, he started submitting patches to the Nooku Framework, and especially to the javascripts parts. We liked it so much we decided to hire him for one day a week.

Daniel Chapman, Ninjaforge CEO, said: ”

For us this collaboration is working out great: several of our products are based on Nooku Framework, so having Stian work with the Nooku team for 20% of his time, is very beneficial for Ninjaboard, Ninja Content, Ninja Video Gallery, and Ninja Journal.”

Gergo and Stian at J! And Beyond. Photo by David Deutsch

Gergő Erdősi

Gergő Erdősi, from Hungary, has been working with us for a while now, but we never properly introduced him. He’s definitely no stranger to the Joomla community. Gergő got involved with the Joomla Sites and Infrastructure Team in 2007. He participated in the Google Summer of Code, and wrote an advanced Joomla survey extension for that. He moved up to the Joomla Bug Squad and the Joomla 1.6 Development Team.

Always on the lookout for interesting developments, Gergő joined the Nooku Mailing List very early on, and displayed an amazing hunger for knowledge and capacity for learning quickly. We flew him over to Belgium to train him for a week, and got him started on building a Scientific Reference management application for our customer, the Italian Institute of Technology. As Gergő wrote on Twitter:

“One of my best decisions was to leave the Joomla core team and join the Nooku community.”

Strong Team

We’re very happy to have Stian and Gergő on board, as we need the manpower to build our new Joomla- and Nooku-based multisite platform for the Belgian Police. The team is now nine people strong, and ready for even bigger challenges!

During our three days at J! And Beyond, the International Joomla Conference, I was interviewed about Nooku Framework. Jack Bremer did an excellent job (it’s hard to believe he’s not a professional interviewer!)

We talked about the growing Nooku Community and the origins of Nooku Content and Nooku Framework. In the middle it gets a bit technical, but hold on, after that there’s some fun stuff about the Joomlasphere’s obsession with Swahili names.

The interview was taped by Zohar Babin. He was at J! And Beyond in his role as Director of Developer Relations and Community for Kaltura, the open source video platform, as they were sponsoring the event. Zohar decided to take the opportunity to learn more about Joomla, by interviewing a number of people in the community. I’m proud to have been one of them. Check out his technology blog for more interviews here and here.

Jack Bremer, the interviewer, runs 3B Digital in London, a full-service digital marketing agency who specialise in Joomla projects, SEO and social media.