Conversation

Hello. I'm Brian Boyko, and I'm one of SilverStripe's newer hires. They brought me on board in mid-May as the company's full-time writer. I'm responsible for anything that involves the written word. And since blog posts, forum notices, and tweets all involve the written word, I'm working on those things as well.

Which is why I'm making this post. I wanted to introduce myself the community, and let you know my goal.

SilverStripe's CEO, Brian Calhoun, asked me to strengthen the two-way communication between SilverStripe and the community. Not just keeping you guys more informed about what's going on in the company—but also listening to what you have to say and making sure that we're focusing on what you need from us to make your jobs easier.

Sure, we've got a discussion forum dedicated to answering technical questions. We also have sales staff and our support team, etc., but I'm going to help facilitate and coordinate those kinds of communication. The goal is not only to answer questions but to get people with "part of a good idea" talking to the people who have rest of the parts of that idea.

As I write this, I'm at SilverStripe HQ, and everyone's engrossed in the various disciplines that go into making SilverStripe better. Which is great, but when people hunker down to work on something extremely tricky, they tend to focus on it like a laser. I don't know if it's human nature or just the nature of the techie subset, but when we get on a roll, it's hard to pull away. It's usually more personally fulfilling to start working on "New Cool Thing" than it is to talk about "Old Thing You Just Finished."

Which is okay—SilverStripe is a company focused on innovation, making "next" a high priority for us. But this also creates a problem because, like any open source project, we're not building alone. Our success depends upon the ideas, insight, and, yes, code, of the SilverStripe community.

Building and maintaining communication is absolutely essential, and that's what I'm here to do. Feel free to contact me at boyko_(at)_silverstripe.com. I'll also be posting to this blog and on the forums, sometimes in a more formal manner for big company announcements, and sometimes a bit more conversational and informal to let you know—or to find out—what's up.