I promised previously to highlight a developer a month. This month I'm highlighting Pete Erickson. I guess this makes Pete our developer of the month. Roy told me he was unwilling to peaceably relinquish his crown. Too bad Roy. It's Pete's turn to shine because he's a superstar and you're old news.
First a little background on Pete. Pete was born and grew up in a teeny tiny village in way northern Minnesota called Roseau.. He attended college at Bethel and then NDSU. He was hired by Great Plains software after school. Pete tells the story of his first week at work. He was informed the company was purchased by Microsoft. He was sufficiently pissed he considered quitting. He didn't though and he continued to work with Microsoft for a couple of years in and out of Redmond, WA. PeteE (as I call him) is passionate about open source and open standards. He enjoys participating in triathlons, biking, hiking, camping, and long walks on the beach with pina coladas. Ok, the last two items I manufactured, but the rest is true.
Open Source Developer Poster Child
Pete manages most of our infrastructure stuff. He's probably the best Linux guy we have other than Geoff. He codes mostly in C# although he's recently become adept in PHP. He manages the NOC, all our software packaging, install guides, and upgrade scripts. Mostly recently he's done a lot of work in Hayes on Lucene with search indexing, he wrote the RSS API, and he even wrote a Drupal authentication service for DekiWiki.
Pete was actually the first engineer hired by MindTouch. He was a contractor even before Roy came on as a full time employee. He was introduced to me by his now girlfriend Marianne who was doing some business administration work for MindTouch. Pete literally worked with me out of my windowless basement for a couple of months off and on. Unfortunately Pete still lives in MN. Hopefully his recent surfing expedition in Pacific Beach with Max will entice him to move to San Diego very soon.
Pete blogs on rare occasions too. He's done a nice write-up about the upcoming Hayes Beta2 release. Specifically he highlights:
- Hayes has a web installer! No @#!t! And PeteE wrote it too.
- New parser
- Live data services
- External Authentication services
- Extensible storage provider model
- New indexing service
- Nicer UI, but I think he means improved presentation layer
Pete's post is a useful read for all you interested Gardeners. Enjoy! Oh, and be sure to click on the photos in this post so you can see the witty Flickr notes I placed on the photos. 
