2012 Top Contributor Awards

Recognizing our community rockstars and legends! These noble individuals have selflessly given in the pursuit of community and open source excellence.

October-December


Jan Geißler

After school, Jan Geißler worked for about 10 years as a Chef in different Restaurants varying from traditional regional to fine dining. Along the way he played in a semi-professional rock band, which occupied the rest of his life.

Getting tired of working on weekends, public holidays and every night Jan decided at the age of 30 to do a fresh start in a different industry, so he began an apprenticeship as application developer at OScomputing AG in Frankfurt am Main. From that time on his focus has been building Web Applications in Java-Environments. Jan started using Liferay with Version 6.0.6, when a customer had requirements which Liferay nearly met. From that time on his company began to focus on using Liferay as a Portal Container and has developed various custom made solutions for different customers.

Jan started posting in the Forum to get help, because at that time the documentation was kind of not there. Now he tries to help other people, because he knows how difficult it can be starting to work with Liferay. He is also a big fan of OpenSource Projects, because they give you the possibility to participate, and you can always dig through the code to see why something is not working as expected.

Aniceto P Madrid

Aniceto Pérez y Madrid is CEO and founder of Innovasoft Proyectos y Servicios, based in Madrid, Spain. He started working with Liferay since version 4.2.

Aniceto has been focused in Liferay portlets using JSF technologies and Vaadin, and lately with Liferay MVC portlets. He has also worked with other plugins: ext, themes, services, and hooks, mainly to add or customize Liferay funcionality.

The long expertise in Java and other related technologies has led Aniceto to debug Liferay Portal source code. This and the launch of Marketplace and some customer requests have led Aniceto to actively contribute to Liferay in some areas, and also to be involved with the Liferay developer community, not only in the development area but also with active participation in Liferay Forums.

One of Aniceto's target is to replace current web platforms with Liferay and portletize customer bussiness apps because with Liferay a lot of work is already done. Not an easy task.

Another area of Innovasoft Proyectos y Servicios current activity are real estate, statistics and project management and retail mainly as web applications.

Aniceto has a Master in Communications by the Escuela Superior de Ingenieros de Telecomunicacion, Madrid 1983. He worked in digital radio communications, hardware, firmware, systems and softwate design, development, testing and integration. He founded Innovasoft Proyectos y Servicios in 1996 as a Software Consulting company for long-term relationship with customers. That strategy has soften the cuts due to current financial crisis.

David Kubitza

David came to Liferay while comparing different portal systems for his master's thesis in 2012. At first he didn't know anything about Liferay, and found it in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. David works with different open source programs and always loved the way open source projects and communities work together, and so was very interested in Liferay.

Because Liferay has a community version that's free to use, David used it for a first try and was excited about it. David wrote his thesis at a mid-sized company and had to convince them. He showed them his first try with Liferay and the company decided to fund a prototype of it in using Liferay EE 6.1 GA1 as a test with a demo license. At the end of David's thesis they decided to start working on the production system with Liferay. Because of different requirements David had to do lots of different things in Liferay and also found lots of bugs. Coming from other open source projects, David is a regular IRC user and so visited the #liferay IRC channel to discuss bugs, features etc., get some help, and give some help back to other users.

July-September


Prakash Khanchandani

Prakash Khanchandani is currently working in Fulcrum World Wide as a Senior Liferay Developer, creating liferay portlets and mentoring team members to pick-up Liferay.

Prakash has been working in Liferay since 2009, starting with version 5.2 CE and has gone  through upgrades of 6.0 CE to EE --> 6.1 GA1 EE --> 6.1 GA2 EE.

Prakash has always been a believer in increasing knowledge & expertise through sharing and he really like the healthy atmosphere of the Liferay community's sharing and open source philosophy where everybody benefits. Hence, he tries to share whatever he has learned from the community and give it in one form or the other through liferay forums, wikis and through other sites like stackoverflow.com [Prakash's profile].

Prakash graduated from Mumbai University, India, in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering and started his career in 2007 with programming in C, C++ and Java.  For the last 4 years he has only been working on developing Java Web applications using frameworks like Struts 1.3, Spring, Hibernate and now portal development with Liferay.

Victor Zorin

Victor Zorin, an Enterprise Architect of MyOffice24x7, (also is known as a rocket scientist due his to PhD in Aerospace Technologies), based in Australia, started working with Liferay 8 years ago on Version 3.

Victor has implemented a number of mission-critical real–time solutions across many industries. These include defence, aviation, telecommunication, financial services, security, international trade, small and medium Enterprises. Most of his attention is now in the area of developing applications that enable effective use of Liferay Portal for Business, and not just as CMS/collaboration/intranet tool. Let Liferay be a better version of SAP!!!

Victor enjoys working for and with Liferay Community with active participation in the forums, mostly in the development area. When Victor is dead tired he can be found walking the streets of Bayside, drinking long black in the local cafés and sailing his 470 in Port Phillip bay.

Jignesh Vachhani

Jignesh has been involved with Liferay from the start of his career in 2008. Gradually, his interest increased toward Liferay with his experience. Initially Jignesh learned a lot and in fact is still learning from Liferay's Blogs, Wikis, and Forums.  He then started to contribute his own knowledge to the community using forum posts (more than 700 of them). Jignesh is also member of BugSquad.

Apart from his contributions on liferay.com, Jignesh has also started a blog  at www.liferaysolution.com around 2 years ago, sharing useful Liferay development tricks faced during project execution.  The blog currently  has more than 100 blog posts and more than 250,000 visitors (some of which are regular visitors). Jignesh is also an active member of LIUG (Liferay's India User Group) and recently coordinated a meetup in Ahmedabad area. He also guides and encourages other interested liferay developers to participate in liferay collaboration activity, especially within his organization (and Liferay partner, CIGNEX Datamatics) since 2008. Jignesh has been involved in more than 13 Liferay projects (from the US, UK, EMEA, and APAC) as a Liferay tech lead and have provided predominant solutions.

Jignesh completed his Bachelors of Engineering in Computer Science in 2008 from Faculty of Technology (DDU, Nadiyad), and wants to contribute as much as he can to the Liferay platform directly or indirectly using liferay.com and its collaboration activity.

April-June


Jelmer Kuperus

Since 1999, Jelmer Kuperus has been a Java Developer working for Orange11, a Dutch company. Jelmer is well known and very active in the security community and has discovered and reported security issues in notable software products such as Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Shockwave Flash, Acrobat Reader, ICQ, Winamp and many others.

Jelmer has been using Liferay on commercial projects since 2010, but begun his Liferay Community involvement as early as 2004, providing feedback to the open source community on ways to improve its architecture and security. He is very active on the forums (with 1000+ posts, most of which answers to questions posted in the development category), and has filed numerous bugs in JIRA, some of which are security related and include contributed patches that resolve the issue. He participated in the 100 papercuts program, and is always willing to help out on IRC when he has the time, and has also contibuted to Juan Fernández' WordPress Importer Portlet, and most recently has been working on a Liferay plugin for Gradle.

Tejas Kanani

Tejas Kanani has been involved with the Liferay Community since 2009. He initially started with version 4.4.2 and is now using Liferay 6.1. He is active in BugSquad and also a member of Liferay India User Group(LIUG). He loves the open source concept and always admires it. Tejas is always ready to help contribute to the Liferay community via forums or directly with individual whenever needed. He has also started a Liferay blog, to which he is constantly adding useful stuff regarding Liferay. He always trys to learn new things out of Liferay. Tejas has started his professional career from day one with Liferay.

Tejas is currently associated with CIGNEX DATAMATICS. He is leading Liferay projects as a Team Lead. He has completed his Bachelors in Computer Science from Dharmsinh Desai University in 2008. Tejas has worked in many different kinds of Liferay projects in various industries such as Healthcare, Intranet Portal, Educational Portal, Media, etc.

Amit Doshi

Amit's interest in Liferay came when he joined CIGNEX DATAMATICS in 2010. He is a member of the Liferay India User Group(LIUG). He started with Liferay version 5.2 and is now using 6.1 He loves to share knowledge with community via the Liferay Forum and also started blogging in Liferay. He has worked on many integration projects with different open source products and also has good knowledge of building corporate intranets.

Amit graduated from Saurashtra University in 2008 holding a Bachelor degree in Computer Science. He comes from the background of Java and J2ME, with the last 4 years spent developing Java Web and Mobile based applications. Amit is currently Leading a team with a web based application based on Liferay.

January-March


Hitoshi Ozawa

Hitoshi is involved in the BugSquad, Community Verifier program, and has created over 145 Japanese wiki pages, several English wiki pages, over 400 pages of Japanese documentation, and has developed Japanese localized version of Liferay, and is currently the top forum poster with over 3800 posts. Hitoshi has come to know Liferay while searching for an open source project to create DCI architecture platform - the next generation architecture proposed by Trygve Reenskaug, the father of MVC architecture. Hitoshi is also a committer with several other open source projects and is integrating them with Liferay to develop DCI platform.

Hitoshi is currently employed by OGIS-RI as an open source evangelist and senior consultant. Prior to OGIS-RI, he was a general manager of a largest e-learning venture in Japan where he was able to half IT cost while drastically improve system availability by strategic outsourcing. He has written several best selling computer books and articles in Japan as well as research papers on SOA.

David Nebinger

David stumbled upon Liferay in 2006 while looking for an open source portal platform for an intranet application implementation. He started with version 4.2 and went through the version 5 and 6 upgrades. David enjoys helping others on the forum, and does so in the spirit of open source. At times, his sense of humor takes some time to recognize and master. One of David's goals is to try and learn something new from Liferay every day.

David graduated from Bowling Green State University in 1995 w/ a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. He comes from a background of C, C++, and Java, with the last 10 years spent developing Java web applications (the last 6 of those years solely on the Liferay platform.) 

Juan Gonzalez

Juan's interest in Liferay came when started his current job in the health car sector in Spain, in 2008. Since then, Juan has tried to understand the platform and apply the best practices he's learned from the community, while at the same time tirelessly giving back as much as possible. Juan has even helped developed some Liferay features, such as Video/Audio preview, and has also maintained patch sets for the Community Edition.  Juan is especially interested in open source, and participates and contributes wherever possible. Apart from Liferay, Juan has contributed to other open source projects, such as JSF Openfaces and Oviyam. Juan also favors Java EE standards, and is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and Sun Certified Web Component Developer, and is studying for the Java Architect certification (Oracle Certified Master).

Juan has participated in e-government projects for Spain, and is now working for his local health care public service (in a hospital) developing some projects. Juan holds a degree of Bachelor Science in Computing from University of Wales.

Drew Blessing

Drew Blessing is an avid participant in the Liferay community. He is involved in the BugSquad, Community Verifier program, and enjoys helping other community members on the message boards and IRC. Drew became familiar with Liferay in late 2010 and is working to integrate other open-source products with Liferay Portal to create a custom learning environment for students. As part of this initiative, Drew is leading two new community projects.

Drew graduated from Chadron State College in 2010 with a degree in Information Management Systems and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Management of Information Systems. He is a Linux System Specialist at Educational Service Unit #10 in Kearney, Nebraska. Drew enjoys programming and has experience in a wide range of languages including PHP, Java and Perl.