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Luis Arias Joins Balsamiq

It is my great pleasure to introduce to you the newest member of the Balsamiq team, monsieur Luis Arias, Web Programmer Extraordinaire. ๐Ÿ™‚

If you've been following us for a while you'll know that Luis and I have been working together since pretty early in the Balsamiq adventure: he coded the Mockups for XWiki plugin back in 2008 as an external contractor.

I enjoyed working with Luis so much that when it came time to start building the Mockups web application back in January 2009, he was my go-to guy.

Luis has been working on myBalsamiq for most of 2009, but only as a part-time project, often being stuck waiting for my input on things. Not budgeting enough time for the web app was one of my main mistakes for 2009, so I see convincing Luis to join as a full-time employee as one big step to correct it.

Luis brings a number of things to the table which our team was missing until now. Four examples:

  • he is a seasoned engineering manager,
  • he has a deep passion and understanding of Test-Driven-Development,
  • he is an avid open-source contributor,
  • he is very aware of (and quick-to-evaluate) new technologies to make our work better.

Luis's job, at least at first, is to take the lead in "all things myBalsamiq". Not only he's the main developer of the back-end of the application, he's also going to coordinate our work and set our priorities for it, as well publishing new releases, responding to support email, and of course making sure the servers are running smoothly.

He has already made a number of contributions to our internal processes, and I'm looking forward to learning more from him in the years to come.

Luis will also run the new "Balsamiq Tech Blog", a place for us to share any open-source library we create (we have a few planned already), tips and tricks for programmers and things we learn the hard way as we develop Mockups on all of these platforms. Head over there to see his introductory post and if you're a programmer, subscibe to our new blog's RSS feed! ๐Ÿ™‚

I am very excited about this new blog starting up, you'll see more of that coming from Marco and Valerie in the near future.

Luis is a genuinely nice person, a family man who loves salsa dancing, plays saxophone and cuban percussions, is a member of the global IT Team for Democrats Abroad France and holds a position there of Member at Large in the Diversity Caucus.

He'll be working out of his home near Paris, France.

Please join me in extending Luis a warm welcome to the Balsamiq family, we are thrilled to have him and are very excited about what we'll be able to achieve together in the future.

Luis' new Twitter account is @balsamiqLuis, which needs followers! ๐Ÿ™‚ You can also follow his personal account if you wish. I have also added @balsamiqLuis to the balsamiq/team Twitter list.

I will be updating our company page to reflect our new 6-team-members status (six!!!!) in the next few days. We're not "a couple of people in a studio" any more, yes! ๐Ÿ™‚

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

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Comments (11)

  1. Waoooo !!! Congrats Luis. Luis has been my boss 15 years ago and I must say he is incredible. Giacomo, you did a good acquisition!! I am following your success for a long time but didn’t know Luis already did something for you, and this morning I see his picture on your blog. This is a small world…

  2. Congrats, Luis, I’m really happy to follow you on Twitter since I’m extra interested about myBalsamiq.

    I will be updating our company page to reflect our new 6-team-members status (six!!!!) in the next few days.

    Giacomo, perhaps you might need to give some new screenshots for your pages as well. In the main page I’m still seeing an old version of Balsamiq when you have delivered so many new features and goodies.

  3. Congrats Luis and everyone on the team!

  4. Congratulations Luis!

    Test driven devevelopment sound good.
    Do it guys!

  5. Congrats Luis ! ! !

    Alexandre Fabri
  6. Congrats Luis.

    Have fun in your new company

  7. Simply congratulations Luis !
    I do hope that we will still maintain our over 20 years of exchange and collaboration in some tech ventures, sometimes worthfully sometime not, but at the end of the day, still remains th epleasure of crossing over rivers of technologies with some fun !
    good luck Luis !

  8. Congrats to Luis, and all Balsamiq Team ๐Ÿ™‚

  9. Congrats to Luis and Peldi and all of the Balsamiq team.

    Now you can field a basketball team with one extra for substitutions!

    Looking forward to an even better mybalsamiq.

    Cheers – Adam

  10. Welcome to our team, Luis! We are proud to have you, and I am looking forward to a long future of lots of laughs and interesting work together. In that order. ๐Ÿ™‚ Yay!

  11. Congrats Luis! (and congrats Peldi for hiring Luis :)).

    I’m sure you’ll bring to Balsamiq the qualities you brought to XWiki a few years ago, among which: your enthusiasm, your kindness and lots of ideas!

    I also hope it’ll mean even more tighter XWiki integration in the future ๐Ÿ˜‰

    Have fun!
    -Vincent