Connecting the dots: An inside look into the story behind my years at MyBB

Posted by Ryan Gordon on December 5, 2010 under Life, MyBB, Programming | 19 Comments to Read

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been on the MyBB Team for 5 years and in this time I’ve lead development for over 2 years.

Recently I resigned from the MyBB Team to pursue separate endeavors.

“All,

As a few have noticed, Ryan Gordon, the lead developer of MyBB has parted ways with us. A message from Ryan is below.

All of us here at the MyBB Group wish Ryan well in his future endeavours, and I personally am extremely grateful for the role that Ryan has been able to step up and fulfil over the past few years whilst I’ve not been able to dedicate much personal time toward the project. Ryan’s dedication and passion for everything he did, as well as bringing us some of the greatest MyBB releases to date, will be missed.

What does this mean for MyBB?

The most important thing to keep in mind is whilst this is a big change for us, you can still look forward to exceptional releases of your favourite forum software. Work is underway planning out MyBB 2.0, and from our top-secret prototypes, it’s already looking great.

We’ll have more to announce shortly, but again thank you for your continued support.

A message from Ryan to all…

Dear community,

It is with time that with every profession, interest and passion fade and something new comes along to take over it’s place. It is with this in mind, among other things, that I have decided to enlist my resignation from the MyBB Team.

Over the past 5 years I’ve had the unique experience of journying with this team and working on this product that has taught me so much. Together we have built hundreds of thousands of communities and I know that this will continue for a long time into the future.

I wish the MyBB team and the community best of luck in the future, as I open up this new chapter in my life.

Sincerely,
Ryan Gordon”

Source: http://blog.mybb.com/2010/12/05/ryan-gordons-departure-from-mybb/

Preface: Firstly I want to note that I will not be revealing any information that isn’t already public. Secondly, what I have to say here is merely a summary of the “main” events. There are countless smaller details that I could spend hours and hours writing on, but distract from the point. Finally, I want to say that MyBB is and always will be a great piece of software and it will continue to get better. The effort put behind the scenes for MyBB was and always has been amazing. To do all of this, to pour time, sweat, blood, and energy into this project for not one cent from thousands of people across the globe unofficially and officially, has always been an amazing concept to be. In fact some might say that those of us who do this for free are part crazy and they are probably right.

The first part of this story begins 5 years 2 months ago when I first joined the MyBB community. Over the next 7 months I went on to create a couple very prominent plugins and also add some content to the wiki, when it first opened. 7 months later I was asked to join the team as Wiki Maintainers along with Justin S. Now I didn’t particularly care for maintaining the wiki forever, but I was new to this game and I wanted to participate in the development of MyBB, so if this was my way in then there was no way I would turn this down.

The next 6 months consisted of aiding MyBB 1.2 Testing and bug fixing in which during this time I was offered development access. On the 7th month, I was promoted to the Project Manager of the new MyBB Merge System. At this point I had submersed myself in learning PHP (at the time) to it’s maximum capabilities and 4 months later the first version of the MyBB Merge System was opened up for beta testing. Following this the next year and a half I started helping out by fixing MyBB 1.2′s bugs and preparing their releases as well as continuing work on the MyBB Merge System and MyBB 1.4. This was probably the most intensive period of my time at MyBB not only because of the large amount of work but because Chris Boulton’s time was now much more limited due to his full time job. At some point during that time I was promoted to Lead Developer of MyBB as a whole and a few months later, Chris officially announced stepping down from day-to-day manager and Dennis took over these day-to-day operations.

From here I lead development on MyBB 1.6 and the planning phase for MyBB 2.0 begun, for the next year and a half. Over the next year my interest in MyBB’s development began to lessen over time as the necessity for time to be dedicated to school and other activities increased. I talked about this several times over various conversations between management staff members and thus began the activity of a recruiting campaign to bring on the next wave of developers and staff members to fully take over all the necessary operations of MyBB and it’s development that I would be leaving behind. This eventually lead to, over a few months, Dennis stepping down as product manager with Tim B. stepping up. A couple months later we had successfully brought on several new staff members to help. Now I had the MyBB staff and more specifically, the development team, in a stable position. The last thing that needed to happen was my resignation, but that wouldn’t happen for a little while longer.

A couple days ago I was having a discussion with Chris Boulton on MyBB 2.0 and this is when I truly realized the different paths we were both now on. The decision to resign was simple at this point and that’s where I am today. I have come out with a new chapter in my life opening and I am excited to put my talents to use on new projects and to see where this different path takes me.

Thanks to everyone who has read this – I wanted to make sure that the right story was out there and to clarify that the terms for resignation weren’t because of, or left on, any bad notes.