Meet The People Behind jQuery

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I would like to take this opportunity to introduce everyone to the people behind jQuery. Not enough has been said about who works for the project and what they do to help out. This fact, combined with a recent re-organization, makes for the perfect time to show you how jQuery works, behind the scenes.

jQuery is an incredible undertaking, with 11 people directly donating their time to furthering jQuery (and countless others contributing plugins, bug fixes, and knowledge). It is important that attention be drawn to the work of all those who help with the project, considering that their work is incalculably valuable.

Expect to see many advancements being made to the jQuery project in the upcoming month (leading up to Jan. 14th – jQuery’s one year “birthday”).

This is a great time to get involved in the jQuery project. Find a team that interests, hop on their mailing list – and get involved. Help is always appreciated. If you don’t have any time to give to the project, financial contributions are always appreciated (and help to maintain the server and level of quality that you expect in the project).

So, without any more hassle, I present to you: The People Behind jQuery.

Development Team

The development team maintains the core aspect of jQuery: The very code itself; pushing the project forward since its inception. It’s been slowly growing, in recent months, keeping up with the demand for features and bug fixes.

The purpose of the development team is just that: To improve the quality of the jQuery code base (by adding in new features) and to fix existing problems (creating a more stable library for everyone to use). Additionally, the team is in charge of documenting all of the jQuery API, building a stable test suite and maintaining the jQuery build system (through which all jQuery code, documentation, and tests are constructed).

John Resig (Massachusetts, United States)

John is a programmer and author living in Boston, Massachusetts. He’s in charge of managing the direction of the jQuery library. This involves taking a critical look at existing (and expected) features and making informed decisions about them. He’s also in charge of managing development resources and time spent on the different aspects of the project.

Jörn Zaefferer (Bergneustadt, Germany)

Jörn is a programmer living in Germany. He’s a driving force of the jQuery development process, contributing numerous bug fixes and pushing out many of the 1.0.x releases. He’s also responsible for completely re-building the jQuery test suite and writing a majority of the test cases. He has been the driving force behind the jQuery development process these past few months, helping to bring jQuery closer to an excellent 1.1 release.

Brandon Aaron (Texas, United States)

Brandon is a developer living in Texas, and a new addition to the development team. Having contributed numerous bug fixes for the 1.0.x releases, he’s now taking a critical look at the Animation and CSS/DOM aspects of the jQuery core. He’s looking to provide significant increases in code speed and clarity. This will give us the ability to do things like pause/resume animations.

Paul Bakaus (Mainz, Germany)

Paul is a programmer living in Germany, and a sponsored contributor to jQuery. His work with jQuery has been focused on transforming jQuery into a high-speed library capable of handling difficult large-scale drag-and-drop operations. He was largely responsible for creating the recent dimensions plugin and for suggesting numerous improvements to the CSS methods of jQuery. All of his work is tied back to the Interface Plugin and attempting to create a high-speed drag-and-drop solution.

Stefan Petre (Romania)

Stefan is a developer living in Romania and the creator of the Interface Plugin. His work with the plugin has been led by the desire to create fast, interactive, web-based applications. Interface has been adopted as an officially-sponsored jQuery plugin (along with a few other high-quality plugins). Paul and Stefan are currently working together to improve the overall quality of the Interface plugin (both in speed and quality of code).

Mike Alsup (New York, United States)

Mike is a developer living in New York and is responsible for maintaining the official form plugin for jQuery. He has worked quite extensively to unify and test the Ajax-form-submission process into a single plugin. Additionally, much of his work has trickled back into improving the quality, and consistency, of the core jQuery Ajax code.

Evangelism Team

This is a brand new jQuery team. The focus of this group is to watch the pulse of the jQuery community (both at home and at large) and help in any way that they can. Frequently, this means building new tutorials, explaining difficult problems, or communicating to the other teams what needs to be updated or changed.

This group can be thought of as a sort of developer relations – communicating the desires of the jQuery users back to the dev/web/design teams, while at the same time, going out of their way to bring jQuery to users who haven’t found it yet.

Rey Bango (Florida, United States)

Rey Bango is a consultant living in South Florida, specializing in the development of Rich Internet Applications. He’s been working with jQuery for a while now, and evangelizing its benefits to a large number of people. He’s already helped to convert a number of prominent Cold Fusion developers. He was also responsible for starting and helping to run the jQuery Button Contest.

Karl Swedberg (Michigan, United States)

Karl is a developer living in Michigan who maintains the web site Learning jQuery. He writes numerous tutorials and helps people to better understand how jQuery works. He is a frequent of the jQuery mailing list, helping new users get adjusted to using the library. As a member of the evangelist team he will be continuing his work, finding people who need help understanding the finer points of the library and giving them the resources that they need to get up to speed.

Web Team

The web team is fully responsible for creating the new jQuery web site. This is a team that’s been in the planning for a long time, but is finally starting to come to light. Much of this has been due to the fact that it’s such a daunting project.

In short, many new features are going to be rolled out in the upcoming weeks. The whole process is going to take some time, but the results will be very rewarding. The first features that you can expect are a proper discussion area (hooked in to the existing mailing list) and a proper repository for all the plugins that exist.

All of this will be built using the Drupal CMS. Recently, we helped Drupal convert over to using jQuery as their primary JavaScript library (powering all Drupal-based sites in the upcoming 5.0 release). In working with the Drupal development team, they’ve been most gracious in offering help in any way that they can, with the new site. In addition to this offer of support, the Drupal engine is fantastically powerful, providing nearly every feature that we need to power the new site.

In addition to the Drupal development team, the following Drupal users have offered to donate their time and effort to help build the new jQuery site.

Mike Hostetler (Colorado, United States)

Mike is a developer living in Colorado. He has significant experience setting up Drupal-based sites. What’s of particular interest is that he already setup a Drupal community and plugin area for another Open Source project: QCodo. He’s already begun work, setting up the base area in which the web team is going to work – and working to integrate the SVN plugin repository directly into the web-based plugin repository (for unified access to all who want it). His work will serve as the base for the rest of the web team’s development efforts.

Tane Piper (Edinburgh, UK)

Tane is a developer living in the UK. He has extensive experience with both PHP and Drupal. Tane recently setup the website getjQuery.org (using Drupal) – at which time I saw the opportunity to bring him in, helping to add many of his desired features to the official jQuery site (like the discussion area and plugin repository, to name a few).

Design Team

The design team is another recent addition to the jQuery development process. The goal of the team is to implement the complete redesign of the jQuery web site, along with all of its upcoming sub-sections (this is working in conjunction with the web team, implementing the design for their work).

There are many individual aspects to this team (such as icon design, branding, graphic design, and XHTML/CSS composition) that will be tied together through the different web projects.

Bradley Sepos (Ohio, United States)

Bradley is an independent designer living in Ohio. He has already started some fine work, creating some excellent mock ups of the new jQuery.com design. He is going to be working on finishing up a solid design for the main jQuery landing page. He will also be in charge of devising a solid branding and design guideline for the rest of the site (and the jQuery project as a whole).

Skye Giordano (Missouri, United States)

Skye is a professor, teaching web design, living in Missouri. He has already been collaborating with Bradley on the design of the new site. In the upcoming weeks he will be focusing on a particular section of the site to completely design from the ground, up. (Such as the discussion area, or the plugin area – this has yet to be decided.)