As we kick off 2008, I’m pleased and extremely excited to announce that we’ve added some awesome, new talent to the SitePen team.

Eugene Lazutkin is highly respected in Dojo circles for his work on Drag-n-drop, GFX (2D and 3D), Charting, and many other crucial 0.9 and 1.0 features. For the past two years, Eugene has also been a key Dojo mentor for the Google Summer of Code. His deep background in 2D and 3D graphics is an asset to any team and we’re looking forward to working with Eugene to help push the state of open web data visualization even further.

Peter Higgins is a prolific contributor to Dojo, improving Dijit and developing tons of great new UI controls. When not building great UIs, Peter has been doggedly helping us build a stronger Dojo community. In addition to joining SitePen, Peter is also assuming the role of official Dojo Evangelist for the Dojo Toolkit.

Kris Zyp is well known for his open source work on JavaScript and JSON. Kris has created numerous projects and products including Authenteo, a web content management system, Persevere, a set of tools for persistence and distributed computing, and JSPON, an extension to JSON for advanced techniques such as multiple referencing, circular referencing, object identification, modification, and structural definition.

Strengthening the SitePen team is one of our primary goals for 2008, allowing us to continue to push the limits of the Open Web! Happy New Year!

You’ve probably heard of Kevin from his work on the TurboGears Python web framework. We’re fans of that work and his approach with TurboGears, namely taking great components and integrating, documenting, and polishing them for real-world use. Needless to say, he’s a great fit for SitePen’s pragmatic approach to solving client problems.

Kevin’s interests are broad, his experience deep, and his perspective already proving invaluable to our team. Like many of the great people at SitePen, look for him to be blogging in this space in the future.