Welcome Intern, Rick Button

This week has been exciting for us a The GForge Group.  We’re wrapping up work on GForge AS v6.2.1 and have broken ground on v6.3.0.  However, more exciting news that we’ve hired our first ever intern, Rick Button.

Rick is a freshman at Purdue University.  I can’t begin to tell you how surprised we were to find a candidate as qualified as Rick with less than a year of college under his belt.  He’s always been a geek, having dove into problem solving and programming at a very young age which made the decision to work on his computer science degree a no-brainer.  When we bring on new talent, we make it very clear we are after problem solvers, willing to work a variety of technologies towards a solution. Rick has already picked up Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails and has just started giving Rust a test spin.  In fact, Rick’s obsession with technology spills over into his free time where he likes to learn how to build decentralized systems and he admits to surfing osdev.org more than is probably healthy.

He is only 4 days into his new role with us but he loves being able to work while attending college and (thankfully) loves the chat feature in GForge which has allowed us to hook him up with our entire support and engineering teams.  Based on the number of support tickets he has fielded and the handful of commits he has already made, we’re sure he’ll be making some great contributions.

Finally, we’d be remiss without giving a special shout-out to Mark Zieg.  Mark, though not a customer, has been following our blog and we found Rick when Mark posted the internship opening on Reddit.  Thanks, Mark…that gesture was tremendously humbling!