We are proud to welcome two talented leaders from our community to the Codewars core team - Matt Wampler-Doty aka xcthulhu and Phil DeJarnett aka OverZealous.

This is a major moment for Codewars as we expand the team in order to move forward with our mission. Even greater still, that we met both Matt and Phil through their contributions to Codewars as community members. They have each advanced through the ranks, summited the leaderboard, and given time, energy and expertise to the Codewars community.

This means a few things for the Codewars. First, we'll be releasing new languages at a very quick pace as our happy Haskell/Clojure users have noticed. Second that we are able to accelerate progress towards our business goals of making our small company financially self-sustaining, so that Codewars can remain free-forever, and have even greater bandwidth for improving the product.

Now Matt and Phil will take away their introductions, and provide color on their skills and role within the team.

Matt, xcthulhu

I am the new back-end guy. As a polyglot, I am primarily responsible for expanding Codewars support to new languages. I started programming unix at 12 on a NeXTStep machine, and installed my first linux machine when I was 14 (my video card was not supported, which meant lots of late nights of recompiling kernels). I studied mathematics at university and hold a masters degree in the subject. Over the years I have worked on the computer assisted proof, embedded design for small satellites, astronomy, machine vision, and computation chemistry. I love functional programming languages, as well as algorithms and recreational mathematics. My recent interests include crypto-currency and computational economic modeling.

Phil, OverZealous

Call me a pixel-pusher, user interface engineer, web developer, or front-end developer. No matter the title, I take ideas and turn them into the part of the application you see.

For the last 15 years, I’ve been hand-coding websites and web applications. I’ve built applications from back to front, using a wide array of technologies. I’ve built applications that make it easier to manage projects, keep track of your business, and manage massive libraries of customized printed materials.

These days I like to focus on the user interface—making it easier and faster for you to accomplish your goals, as well as build tools—making it easier and faster for me.

Outside of Codewars you can find me online at my home page, StackOverflow, or Github. In real life I can be found with my wife and daughter in Louisville, Kentucky.