Community | Forum Insider: Community | Forum Insider -> Interview with Ryan Gordon - MyBB Lead Developer

It's Monday, and to welcome us back from the weekend we've got two more interviews on the way. The first is with Ryan Gordon, Lead Developer of the increasingly popular MyBB forum software.

Can you tell us a little about yourself, and what you’re interested in outside work?
I am currently a very active 17 year old senior in High School. I have had a background in programming and forum software for over 5 years now, since I was 12 years old. I first became interested in computer science when my 5th grade teacher let me fix his computer lab. Since then I have always had a passion for the computer science field and everything I have learned in that field since then has been self-taught. This has allowed me to work 2 summer internships in development and SQA positions, allowing me to apply my experiences and continue to expand my database knowledge. Outside of work, I've always had a sweet spot for the sport of Soccer, having played the game for 10 years. To this day, I still love the sport. I also participate in my schools Robotics Club where I act as the Lead Programmer, but I also love to get my hands dirty with the mechanics and electrical creation of the robots we create.

Besides that, I am still your average teenager, whom loves to relax (or procrastinate), hang out with friends, go to the movies, crack jokes all the time, and in general be an all-around "your friend" kind of guy.

How did you first get involved with forum software?
My venture with forum software all began at the Atari Community Forums where I participated in a community of "Roller Coaster Tycoon" enthusiasts. This really showed me how powerful of an environment a forum software could create. This soon led to me to start my own fansite, then a site plus a forum running phpBB 2. After several months of using phpBB, myself and the administrators of the fansite decided we wanted to choose a new forum software with a more versatile feature list. After much searching, my friend and now Lead MyBB Designer, Justin S., discovered MyBB and we made the switch instantly. After I found MyBB, I started learning PHP and MySQL and creating plugins for MyBB. Once MyBB opened an official Wiki, myself and Justin S. began contributing to it. I was then asked to join the MyBB Team as Official Wiki Maintainers. From there my history on the MyBB Team seems like clockwork. After getting involved with providing fixes to bugs in MyBB for some time, I was moved to a Developer position. For the next couple years, I led the MyBB 1.2 Beta's, became the lead developer of the MyBB Import System (which later became the MyBB Merge System) and was largely responsible for the development of MyBB 1.4, including much of the ACP. A few months after the release of MyBB 1.4, I was promoted to Lead Developer and I continue to lead MyBB 1.6's development.

What in particular interests you about forum software?
My interests in forum software are based on the fact that it's something that places a major role on the internet and creates communities. As a side effect, I have been able to use it as a learning tool to practice my skills and improve continually. With these skills in hand, I'll be able to get ahead in my future educations and work experiences.

What would you say is the most commonly requested feature by your users in 2009? and what do you expect it might be in 2010?
The most requested features by our users in 2009 would probably be split between an Auto Update feature and a WYSIWYG editor. While we don't have plans to implement these within a 2010 time frame release, they will definately be in MyBB 2.0.

What feature or features added in your most recent release are you most excited by?
While MyBB 1.6 is not released yet, my favorite feature would probably have to be support for multiple memcached servers. While obviously it won't interest most of our users, it is exciting to me because of how it is technically "cool." Yes, I am a geek.

Can you tell us about any upcoming features? Anything you think will particularly interest your users?
All of MyBB 1.6's feature list is available to the public, which you can find on MyBB's development site (http://dev.mybboard.net). I can't talk about MyBB 2.0 much, but I can confirm that MyBB 2.0 will create a framework allowing MyBB to be easily extended, customized, bridged, and can be used as a core for other software. I think the extensibility allowing bridging will be a major addition to our user base. Current employments of bridging on the MyBB 1.x series use sketchy workarounds and not-so-clean code. We're aiming to make it much more feasible by employing the latest decade of standards and programming technology/technique.

Who do you consider to be your biggest competitors at the moment? and is there anything they are doing at the moment that interests you?
I would consider IPB to be our biggest competitor right now. Their development is interesting to follow, I've seen only a few new interesting ideas/concepts. One such idea is changing PM's into more of a "thread-like" or "texting-like" style of conversation. Although, I am not sure I agree with their new style of PM conversations, that would definately be one of the most interesting features I've seen changed. Among the others are things like the ability to adapt and build themes to work specifically with smart phones.

If you could go back change one thing about forum software before it became the de-facto standard, what would it be?
I would have to say I would have standardized BBCodes. The dozens of different BBCode's available to users on the internet is probably one of the most confusing things to adapt between different forum software.


Thank you very much to Ryan for taking the time to do this interview for us. I love finding out about someone so young who has been involved in web development for song long, and congratulations to him for being involved in such a great project.

As always, we're still looking for more interview candidates. If you work on a forum software, or run a forum of your own, please get in touch!