Employee interviews

Behind the software of MySQL AB are of course the people. The MySQL developers, and the many other colleagues around them, are the ones who are making it all happen: new features, bug fixes, support, etc. Some of you may have met a few of them already, either at a previous MySQL Users Conference, or another occasion. As Community Relations Manager, I recently had the privilege of meeting all our developers at an internal company meeting in Malta, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to start some interviews. In this series, I aim to show you the faces of at least some of these people. — Arjen Lentz

MySQL developer staff meeting, Malta, October 2004

• Dean Ellis, (June 2005)
  by Arjen Lenz
  

  Dean Ellis is a Senior Support Engineer and Support Group Manager at MySQL AB. We first spotted Dean in the #mysql channel on the Freenode IRC network (irc://irc.freenode.net/mysql), assisting many other users with his expertise.

• João Prado Maia, (June 2005)
  by Arjen Lentz
  

  João Prado Maia is a Senior Software Engineer for the Internal IT department of MySQL AB. We were lucky to catch him in the wild a few years ago with his project Eventum, which we will talk about more also.

• Timour Katchaounov, (March 2005)
  by Arjen Lentz
  

  Timour Katchaounov is a member of the MySQL Optimizer group. From my own experience, this means that the only people who understand what he does will be the other members of the group (and of course, Monty). I sometimes ask Timour when I hack around a bit in the server source - he knows stuff. But in a nutshell, his group makes MySQL faster.

• Catching up with Monty, (August 2004)
  

  Michael "Monty" Widenius is the CTO and co-founder of MySQL AB, and the original developer of much of the MySQL code base. Before Monty went into hiding to dive into work on new features for MySQL 5.0 (and spend time with his newborn daughter), we caught up with him on MySQL 4.1 and the state of the company from his point of view.

• Oleksandr "Sanja" Byelkin, (January 2005)
  by Arjen Lentz
  

  For my first interview I chose Oleksandr "Sanja" Byelkin, who has played a key role in the development of some very important MySQL features in the last few years.

• Reggie Burnett, (January 2005)
  by Arjen Lentz
  

  The "Connectors team" is an important group among the MySQL developers, as good client APIs are of course vital when using MySQL. One of the most recent additions is Connector/Net for .NET applications, and in this interview we talk with the author of this connector, Reggie Burnett.

• Alexander "Salle" Keremidarski, (January 2005)
  by Arjen Lentz
  

  Alexander "Salle" Keremidarski is one of MySQL's Support Engineers and Support Group Manager.

• Lenz Grimmer, (January 2005)
  by Arjen Lentz
  

  Lenz Grimmer (yes, jokes have been made about the similarity of Lenz' first name with my last name) is my first non-developer interview. However, he does play a very important role within software engineering at MySQL AB, as you will see!

• Sergei Golubchik, (January 2005)
  by Arjen Lentz
  

  Sergei Golubchik is one of the "old hands", one of the first ten with the company.

• Guilhem Bichot, (January 2005)
  by Arjen Lentz
  

  Guilhem Bichot is our resident expert on MySQL replication. After taking over the baton from Sasha Pachev who did the original implementation, he has been busy enhancing and extending this popular MySQL feature.