[Council Update] Introducing our new hires

[Philipp Kewisch]

Hello Team Thunderbird-Enthusiasts!

I’d like to give you another update on what we’ve been up to since May.
The exciting news is that our team is expanding, thanks to your
continued support and donations. Please join me in welcoming the
following fine folks:

Geoff Lankow [:darktrojan] is the first of three developers we have
hired in response to our developer job posting. As a former contributor
for Lightning, Geoff already has experience with the code base and was
able to dive right in. He is working on the future of Thunderbird
add-ons, as well as helping out Jörg with ensuring the nightly builds
are stable.

Arshad Khan [:arshad] is also from the calendar world. He came to us as
a Google Summer of Code student and worked on a prototype for porting
calendar dialogs to React. Now that he has completed his degree, we
hired him to work on Thunderbird’s front-end. The main work will be
reducing usage of XUL and XBL and moving toward HTML and Web Components.

Next up is Ben Campbell [:bcampbell]. While he is new to the Mozilla
world, he knows his way around C++ and has shown some great skill. He
will be working on the platform side of Thunderbird, for example ironing
out remaining bugs in maildir support.

We’ve also hired Rob Lemley [:rjl], our new build engineer. He is here
just in time for the Thunderbird 60 release, and will then be helping us
document and improve our build pipeline.

Additionally, we've increased our community manager Ryan’s hours to full
time, allowing him to be more proactive than reactive.

Finally, I am happy to announce our new technical manager, Magnus Melin
[:mkmelin]. He has been with the project for over a decade. He will be
managing our team, freeing up council time for other tasks. In addition
he will take up technical tasks as mentioned in an earlier update.

At the same time, Jörg [:jorgk] will no longer be working for us
directly. Instead, he was hired by pEp Security
<https://www.pep.security/>, where he will continue his work as
Thunderbird’s code sheriff and developer. We greatly appreciate pEp’s
support and hope to find more companies willing to sponsor a team member
in the future. (If you are interested in doing this, please get in touch!)

All of this would not have been possible without the support of our
donors. If you enjoy our work and would like to support our efforts in
the future, why not take a moment to set up a recurring donation
<https://donate.mozilla.org/thunderbird/?frequency=monthly&utm_source=tb-planning-updates&utm_medium=email>
right now? Your donations will help us in our mission to free the inbox!

-- Philipp, on behalf of the Thunderbird Council

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