Crystal Core Team Announcements
A lot has been going on in the Crystal Core Team, and the community has voiced its need for more (and more frequent) communication. This post is an attempt to catch up with that. I’m taking the license of using “we” for both Crystal and Manas.Tech in this short update.
The team has been moving forward and focusing on releasing 1.0, which is intended to be a more stabilized version of 0.36 with few new additions. We know that we could always add, fix or improve one more little thing before releasing. Still, we believe this is long overdue and that the lack of a v1.0 is an obstacle to adoption.
We wanted to share the news that Johannes Müller (@straightshoota) has joined Manas as a full-time employee. Johannes is a years-long member and contributor of the Core Team, and we are thrilled to have him join us to continue to work on the language’s evolution.
Coincidentally, Brian (@bcardiff) and Juan (@waj) will be moving onto new challenges outside Manas, though Juan will remain in an advisory role. This does not affect their commitment to the development of Crystal. They will remain part of the Crystal Core Team and continue to be involved as voluntary contributors.
But we have excellent news in terms of Crystal leadership coming from Manas. We are incredibly excited to announce that Beta Ziliani will join the Crystal team at Manas to pick-up the baton. Beta is a programming language researcher with a Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and holds a professorship on Advanced Concepts of Programming Languages and Paradigms of Programming. He has been involved with Crystal for a while. Beta was one of the first Manas employees, and he left to pursue his academic research more than ten years ago. We are proud and happy to have him join back.
We also wanted to announce that Manas will be hiring a Community Manager for Crystal. We know that’s a long overdue need, and we are excited to find the right person to steward this fantastic community. Please help us spread the word!
To make all this sustainable in the long term, we need to significantly increase our sponsorships and donations. We believe the 1.0 release and the new roles described will help us move towards that. All small personal donations at OpenCollective help, and if you work at a company that could become a corporate sponsor, please reach out at crystal@manas.tech so we can work with you.