Who's on the Team?

Hi Daniel:

Out of curiosity, and I hope you can share this (considering employee privacy laws and rules, etc.), but who are the Steinberg employees that are currently working on Dorico?

Obviously there’s you, and I have seen a name “Ed Doll” as tech support, but presumably there are more, including but not limited to people who used to work at Avid. I’m curious what everyone is doing, and whether they are assigned to particular groups (core engraving application, audio engine, tech support, etc.).

I understand that aside from employee privacy issues, obviously you can’t spill the beans on Steinberg business secrets, but a bit more insight into the people behind the product would be very interesting …

Thanks!

We know already, from the fact that they’ve posted here, that there is an Ed Doll (described as “Tech support”) and Paul Walmsley (“Steinberg Employee”).

There are a few team members lurking on the list who may introduce themselves, but in summary there’s about 12 of us that were part of the Sibelius team for between 2 and 14 years, and we’ve picked up a couple of new team members part-way through the Dorico project.

I was a developer on Sibelius for many years, between versions 2 and 7. On the Dorico team my main interests are the overall application architecture. My main focus for the coming months is the Playback system. We have some of the company’s finest minds in Hamburg on the audio engine part, and I will be doing the integration and many of the other playback features. I’ve also got an interest in scripting - I’ve put in the current Lua system and binding mechanism, though we’ve yet to decide on the API (see the other thread on this: Plugins? - #2 by dspreadbury - Dorico - Steinberg Forums )

To expand on Paul’s answer…

Ed is the manager of the whole of Steinberg’s support team, and he’s based in Hamburg. We are planning to have one or two dedicated Dorico support people based in Hamburg with Ed and the rest of his team covering English- and German-language support.

We have seven developers working on Dorico: Paul, James, Graham, Michael, and Andrew all previously worked on Sibelius for many years; András and Stefan joined us about two years ago (and Stefan is the husband of somebody who also used to work with us back in the Sibelius days).

We have three software testers, though that rather pedestrian title belies the true impact they really have on our project, which is profound in many dimensions: Richard (who leads the team), Toshi, and Akiko.

There are four of us who have the word “manager” in our titles along with various other combinations of words: there’s me, there’s Ben, who heads up the team and in addition to taking care of all logistical issues also writes internal tools to help us work smarter (he’s been invaluable in developing SMuFL and our ongoing work on instrument data), there’s Anthony (who is responsible for the beautiful look of Dorico), and there’s Bill, who is our agile team leader (runs the development process) and is also doing some development work on Dorico.

So there are fourteen of us here in London, and of course we all rely on the support and expertise of all of our colleagues in Hamburg.

Very cool – thanks Paul and Daniel.