Hey everyone!
So, it's been a hectic few months for the website! Long story short, a very talented developer (David Beck) pretty much built this site from the ground up, and after many years on the job he wanted to move on to bigger and better things. At the moment, he's full-time developing an incredible algorithm/program/whatever that's attached to Section Zero but goes much bigger than the UMAT. It's pretty groundbreaking stuff, but you guys will see in due time.
We had a lot of struggles finding a developer who could meet the demands of the ATAR Notes website, which has a lot of technology attached to it. We use SMF, WordPress, and custom code written by David. With all of these technologies interacting, we need someone who's extremely skilled and talented to even understand the way the pieces of the site are working together - let alone work with the site itself.
This made things difficult, because for a while we didn't have a developer, because our opinion was that it would be better to have no one and wait for someone that can give this community the love it deserves than to hire someone who just wasn't up for the job. This was even worse when we had server issues and things of that nature because it meant we had to scramble and hire niche server specialists from all over the place to make sure things were fixed quickly. We found
Slydev a few months ago and he's been working really well with the site, and we're unequivocally excited to announce that he is now this community's official developer.
Most recently, he oversaw our transition from our old server to the same server hosts that Netflix use (woohoo!). However, last week for about a day the site had some more issues, which is seemingly impossible given that our server is now amazing. We've had a lot of people look at this stuff to try and diagnose the issue and we thought moving servers was the end of it. SlyDev made a breakthrough last week and started uncovering different issues. Little tiny pieces of custom code weren't optimal, and there was some relic code like the old 'forced redirect' code (which we disabled a while ago) that was doing funny stuff to the website. At the moment he's optimising all of that stuff to make the website essentially bulletproof. He's also been building the tutoring list, which is 99% finished, with the 1% delayed while he fully optimises the site.
Point of story is: this guy's amazing. We're crazy lucky to have found him and crazy lucky that he loves education and really wants to work with this community, even though there are more 'glamorous' things in the IT world that he could be doing. I'm introducing you to him now because I want you guys to communicate issues and suggestions to him directly. Keep in mind that he has a lot of projects to work on. At the moment, he's developing some pretty cool stuff that will split the website without anyone ever realising, so VCE people think it's a VCE-only website and HSC people think it's an HSC-only website (with only relevant content served to relevant audiences). This means he can't be at your beck and call
. However, it means that when he has spare hours, he can look at what you guys would like done, see which suggestions are logically possible and then improve the site before your eyes. I think this is really exciting and I've wanted to introduce him for ages... It's going to make things a lot easier, and if you guys encounter issues, they'll be dealt with even quicker than before.
In this thread, you can chat to The SlyDev and he can chat to you. You can suggest little things or even point out things on the site that aren't as optimal as they could be, and he can add them to his to-do list (which he keeps organised quite religiously) and smash them out when the chance arises. Make sure you're nice to him and don't scare him away - we want this guy around for a while
Oh and his respect count is running a little low. Make sure you shower him with upvotes and give him a huge welcome to the forums
.
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