Farewell Uncle Cheese

It’s with very bittersweet emotions that we have to announce that Aaron Carlino (aka Uncle Cheese) will be leaving Silverstripe Ltd. Aaron has been a fixture of the Silverstripe CMS community for close to 15 years.

He first got involved in the Silverstripe CMS project in 2007. We can find him arguing with Ingo on the Silverstripe forum archive all the way back in 2008. 

He authored several highly popular modules for Silverstripe CMS such as the classic Kick Assets and Better Buttons, just to name a few. He’s been a tireless evangelist for Silverstripe CMS answering community questions, producing a series of tutorials to help other developers, and updating our documentation. Over the years, he gave dozens of talks at conferences and meetups … and had to recount the story of how the “Unclecheese” nickname came about at every single one.

Aaron is so passionate about Silverstripe CMS that he left Vermont for New Zealand to take a job at Silverstripe Ltd in 2014. There, he made a massive contribution to the Silverstripe CMS core modules with 1259 commits and close to 1,050,000 new lines of code. He was instrumental in the development of Silverstripe CMS 4, completely rebuilding  the asset administration and our graphql server implementation. More recently, Aaron has been extending what’s possible to achieve with Silverstripe CMS, developing an integration for ElasticSearch and exploring how Silverstripe CMS can be used as a Headless CMS.

No one better embodies the Open-Source ethos that motivates us to work on Silverstripe CMS. Above all else, Aaron has been an outstanding colleague to all of us, always eager to lend a hand for the big and the little problems. 

As Aaron’s Silverstripe journey comes to a close, a new one is about to begin. It’s been a privilege to be fellow travellers with Aaron on his Silverstripe journey. One thing is certain, whatever is next for Aaron, he’ll bring with him the same passion, the same insight and the same relentless optimism that we’ve all learned to love and cherish.

What does that mean for the future of Silverstripe CMS?

Aaron leaving is a big loss for the open source team at Silverstripe and his energy and contributions will be missed. However, Silverstripe is still fully committed to maintaining and improving Silverstripe CMS.

As our CEO, Wayne Yarr, hinted in his recent Stripecon EU keynote, we’ve been rethinking the strategy we take to working on Silverstripe CMS. This new strategy will lead to a renewed focus on the development of Silverstripe CMS as well as additional resources. We’ll be sharing more details over the coming months.

In the short term, we’re advertising two product developers roles. These developers will join the CMS Squad and work full time on Silverstripe CMS. Initially, these roles are open to candidates from all over New Zealand. If we can’t find suitable candidates in New Zealand, we may open the roles to overseas candidates.

If CMS development is not your thing, we also have lots of other positions to fill in the bespoke and platform sides if you are keen to join the growing Silverstripe team.