| Compuart, Lead Developer
Compuart, Lead Developer How long have you been involved with coding? I started coding BASIC on a Casio databank about 15 years ago. After that I've done other BASIC dialects, C++, Pascal, Perl, and currently am coding mainly in PHP. What applications do you use to code? Edit Plus, a simple but effective text editor. What is your typical daily agenda as an SMF Developer? I try to divide my time between fixing bugs, quality improvement and adding new features. Beside coding I spend a lot of time on SMF's community forum. After all, that's where a lot of SMF's users are. What advice can you give new coders? Be dying to know how things work. Curiosity is a virtue. Go into great depths to satisfy it. What do you do when you're not coding? I'm a student at Twente University, doing Industrial Engineering and Management. Apart from that I like riding my bike and skiing in the French Alps, both at great speeds if possible. Do you work on any other projects other than SMF? Six years ago I founded a fan site covering the Dutch TV series of 'Who is the Mole?'. This site has grown into a more general reality TV fan site. The community forum (SMF of course ) has grown to near 650,000 posts and 12,000 members. It's pretty hard trying to divide my time between this project and Simple Machines Forum, but both projects benefit from each other. Administrating a forum like Realitynet.nl helps seeing things from a different perspective than you would when only focusing on development. What piece of the SMF code are you most proud of? There are many pieces of code I'm proud of. Some of the JavaScript'ed features are pretty slick in my opinion. But maybe the thing I'm most proud of is the search engine. Although it's still in development, I think the engine is already very effective, powerful and flexible. What is the biggest mistake you have made while working on SMF (be honest )? Well, at some point SMF added client side encryption to the passwords used to login into ones SMF account. Firefox's password manager remembered the encrypted password, causing it to fail each time a user logged into their account using the password manager. After studying the problem in depth, I thought I had found the solution. I was pretty excited about it and implemented it on several live sites. Of course it turned out the solution wasn't actually a solution and my colleague developer ([Unknown]) subtly pointed out my mistake. Firefox or Internet Explorer? Firefox certainly beats Internet Explorer. More flexible, a better JavaScript debugger available and more secure. It's a shame Microsoft stopped developing Internet Explorer after releasing version 6. Back then they were innovative and way better than Netscape. Now that they're back creating version 7, they have a lot of catching up to do. Opera is in some ways better than Firefox, but still I currently use Firefox as my default browser. Will we ever have to pay for SMF in the future? In short, no. How do you handle supporting a free product? I just love SMF, should be enough reason to keep supporting it If you were advising a future forum owner, what is the one reason you would give him or her to use SMF over any other? Just one? Ehm, I'd say, there's no forum software that keeps track of the topics you've read as good as SMF. You won't miss a message. What upcoming SMF feature are you most excited about? The moderator center! It should be paradise for the moderator. How do you see SMF changing over the next 5 years? 5 years is a long time in the internet environment. By then internet probably will have been even more integrated into our lives. SMF will also move towards tight integration into several platforms. Currently, SMF has already been made suitable for wireless devices, RSS-readers, Server Side Includes, etc. More platforms are added regularly and at some point I wouldn't be surprised if communities would be mutually integrated to form a world wide web of communities. Also it will be getting easier and easier to create and maintain an SMF community. Ease of use, it's in our name, is very important. In 5 years, even though SMF will have more features, the ultimate newbie will be able to start a community without a problem ('normal newbies' already can). If the sky were the limit, what would be the one thing you would add to SMF? A large library of official modifications, features that wouldn't make it as built-in features, but would be useful to many users. If the entire staff of SMF were stranded on a deserted island, who would be the first to be eaten and why? I guess that would be me. Why? Because bugs seem to like me.
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