This seems to be a good place to introduce myself.

My Name is Nicolai Hess,
I follow the squeak (and pharo) community for some years (~10).
(Not as an *active* member in that time, but a little bit more the last days:-)
I am a software developer, most time working with c++ and java.
Every time I start to dive into smalltalk world (again),
even  if all i have done are bugreports or small bugfixes,
it impressed me how much more fun it makes.

Looking at smalltalks history I was always deeply impressed about all
its development and *inventions*.
(And a bit sad, it is not as recognized as it
could be, and seeing how others again reinventing these things.)

It is great to see how pharo and the community moves on.
Thank you all.

Nicolai

2013/12/6 Torsten Bergmann <astares@gmx.de>

Maybe others noticed the same:

 - the numbers of closed issues is amazing(see the news on the homepage)
 - Pharo3.0 is already really usable and a pleasure to work with
 - more and more nice projects appear on STHub and elsewhere
 - more and more Pharo projects use continuous integration
 - most projects and packages are loadable from the config browser and other places without
   conflicting with each other
 - there is so much activity regarding Pharo these days on mailinglists, bug-tracker,
   twitter, conferences, blogs, stackoverflow, github ... it becomes hard to follow
   but this is a good sign
 - I see more and more fixes and improvements already as an update coming in before
   I really realize that an own bug is needed because it improves the situation
 - more and more new names appear on the dev and user mailinglist which is a good
   sign that there is growing interest
 - Pharo is on the right track and I like to be on the train

Step by step it goes...

Bye
T.