2013 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


Pier Paolo Ramon

Pier Paolo is an italian self-taught front-end developer. Since his inclusion in the SMC team in 2009 he worked on various Liferay projects, from a Social Network built on top of version 5.1, to B2B/B2C solutions. He worked with his colleagues Andrea Di Giorgi and Fabio Pezzutto on the new Liferay 6.2 Calendar, and he was a speaker at the 2013 DevCon and Liferay Italian Symposium.

In the last months of 2013 Pier has been busy porting the Liferay Mobile SDK to Appcelerator's Titanium SDK, to give Liferay developers an easy path to follow to build Enterprise Mobile application using Liferay as a back-end.

Denis Signoretto

Denis Signoretto (@denissignoretto) is an italian Project Manager, Java Developer, and an Open Source enthusiast. Denis started working with open source since his university days where he started working as GNU Linux/Unix system administrator. After obtaining his Bachelor in Computer Science, he started to work as a Java Developer with portals.

Nowdays Denis is working as Liferay Developer and Project Manager at Intesys S.r.l., a company in the North of Italy. He started working at Intesys and with Liferay since 2008 and took part in many different portal and integration projects, in many different roles, including architect, developer, and portal administrator. His work and interests at Intesys are also related to Enterprise Application Integration, Enterprise Content Management Systems like Alfresco, Identity and Access Management Systems and other enterprise open source products. Denis feels that participating in the Liferay community has been really exciting, and he has met a lot of expert and professional people. In particular, this year, Denis had the opportunity to attend Liferay's DevCon 2013 in Berlin. He felt it was a great occasion to get in contact with a lot of community members, Liferay staff and engineers and share with them experiences and new ideas. All of them are not only professionals but also special people representing great human capital. Talking and sharing experiences with other people in the Liferay Community is one of the best way to build something different, something that holds a different point of view that makes a product like Liferay complete and unique.

Nagul Meera Mahankali

Nagul Meera has 4 years of experience in Liferay Portal and Java Technologies and is currently working for Vinculum Group, Hong Kong as a Liferay Technical Consultant. Nagul Meera started his career in 2011 by joining Vidyayug Soft Technology Pvt Ltd,  an IT company in Hyderabad, India. Mr. Suresh is an Architect and Founder of Vidyayug Soft Technologies has given Nagul Meera an opportunity to work on Liferay Portals.

From that time onwards he started his journey with Liferay, developed many applications and the resulting interest in Liferay encouraged him to become a member of the Liferay Community. Nagul Meera loves to help people resolve their problems by giving answers in Liferay Forums and also maintains his own website www.Liferaysavvy.com dedicated to sharing his Liferay knowledge with people and to help them to learn Liferay technologies. Learning and Exploring is his passion, especially in Liferay and Java Technologies

July-September


Dhrutika Vyas

Dhrutika Vyas has been a part of the Liferay Community since she started her career in 2009. When she joined CIGNEX DATAMATICS as an intern, her mentor Tarun Kayasth introduced her to the Liferay Forums and she also found it interesting. She loves to help people by participating in forums whether it is a really silly or beginner question or tricky question, because one's small help can reduce others' efforts. She has also participated in Liferay 6.2 Beta Testing and also reported some issues in Liferay's JIRA. She has also started Blogging recently.

Dhrutika has been working as Liferay Developer at CIGNEX DATAMATICS for more than 4 years. She has been part of more than 10 Liferay Projects in various domains like healthcare, insurance, IT, intranet portal, etc. She is also managing the Liferay training program and working as a Liferay Trainer at the organization level. She received her Bachelors of Computer Engineering from Dharmsinh Desai University, Nadiad in 2009. 

Jan Hájovský

Jan Hájovský is a university student of the Technical University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic, while working as a software engineer at profiq. He was introduced to Liferay as part of his R&D activities at profiq, where he focused on exploring the integration of Liferay with the Amazon S3 cloud storage service. He published a number of blog articles and participated in the Liferay 6.2 Beta program as a result of his exploration.

Jan says: "Working with Liferay is a technically interesting given technical complexity of the product. I find it also personally rewarding experience because the product is popular around the globe and because Liferay is responsive to requests and inputs from community members." Jan is a longtime Linux enthusiast (since secondary school) and enjoys riding his motorycle.

Andrew Jardine

15 years of professional consulting in all manner of domains and products has left Andrew with a pretty good survey of many products in the industry. Like most technologists he has gone through waves of change -- from loving products to developing a passion for open source and knowledge sharing. A few years ago Andrew made the jump to his first product company, the former Endeca Technologies. It was there that Andrew was first exposed to Liferay and it was love at first sight. To say he is obsessed with Liferay is an understatement -- so much so that he does not hesitate to title himself an unofficial Liferay evangelist. Andrew tries to "sell" it to any one who will listen and am constantly trying to demo the benefits to anyone with a line of sight to his laptop.

When Oracle purchased Endeca Andrew decided that this was the time to go out on his own and offer niche consulting services. Liferay is one of the products that he has chosen to specialize in. In that last few years he has managed to work on 6 separate Liferay projects with versions ranging from 5.2.3 right through to 6.1.2 -- EE and CE.

For the community, Andrew has a list of extensions he plans to build to share and an even longer list of unpublished blog posts and video tutorials. For now there just aren't enough hours in the day to get to it all so he tries to help where he can, especially in the IRC channel -- with the goal of helping new developers to the platform skip the frustrations that come with learning any new product and helping them recognize the beauties of Liferay in a shorter time.

April-June


Sébastien Le Marchand

Sébastien Le Marchand is CTO & Co-founder at Pix2know, a mobile app about photos. Previously, since he started to work for the Liferay Partner SQLI in 2007, he has been involved in numerous Liferay-based projects for various customers, in order to achieve miscellaneous tasks, including development, technical expertise, performance optimizations or consulting. Sébastien has more than 8 years experience in software engineering and holds an Engineer Degree from University of Rennes, France.

Kamesh Sampath

Kamesh Sampath is an Open Source Evangelist with around 13+ years with expertise on Portals. He holds a Master's Degree in Information Technology from the University of Madras, and he currently works as Sr.Technical Architect with Accenture, India.

Kamesh's portal journey started with Websphere and he stumbled up on Liferay portal in 2006 when searching for an Open Source Lightweight Portal Container that could help test the Portlets developed for Websphere. Kamesh has architected, designed and built Portlets using JSF, Vaadin, Liferay MVC etc., along with integrating Liferay with other open source technologies.

Kamesh actively contributes code to Liferay IDE some of the highlights include the  portlet.xml configuration editor and Liferay Binary Import feature.

Apart from Liferay IDE contribution he also contributes blogs, forums and features requests for Liferay Portal and IDE. Kamesh's other Open Source contributions related to Liferay include Red Hat OpenShift JBoss Liferay Quickstart (which allows the users to have their Liferay based Portal Platform as Service on JBoss AS7), and a Chef recipe for Liferay Community Edition (which has a collection of Chef recipes which will allow the user to install and configure Liferay Portal platform on Cloud as well as in Developer boxes along with the necessary development tools).

Kan Zhang

Kan Zhang is currently a Technical Lead at Dunn Solutions Group, a full-service IT consulting firm. He is based in the Chicago headquarters office. He provides technology vision and practical leadership in the company, specializing in Liferay projects since 2010.

Kan is actively involved in the Liferay developer community, participating frequently in the blogs, forums, and wiki pages. He is a member of the Chicago Liferay User Group, and has been invited to speak on topic of inter-portlet communications at their August meeting.

Kan is an professional in enterprise Java technologies, with 5 years of experience. As an expert in Liferay, he has worked as a technical consultant spanning many diverse industries, including finance, insurance, energy, education, and computer hardware. He has worked with many Fortune 500 clients, designing and implementing mission-critical and business-critical applications on the Liferay platform.

Kan's interests and expertise involve system integration of legacy systems with Liferay. Recently, he has used Enterprise Service Bus as an integration platform, connecting Liferay to IBM AS400 mainframe business applications. He has implemented customized Liferay single sign-on solutions with legacy systems, using CAS, Siteminder, etc., for a variety of clients. Kan is also experienced with front-end user interface design, allowing for intuitive, rich, and responsive web experiences within Liferay.

January-March


Oliver Bayer

Oliver finished his study of Applied Computer Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences in Ravensburg/Weingarten back in 2008 with a diploma degree.Since then he's been hired by the IT Service Center of the university for realizing the migration process from the previous Content Management System (CMS) over to a modern portal based solution. After doing market research Oliver quickly came across a more and more booming Liferay, starting with version 5.2 back in the day. Since then he's been working with his colleague Klaus Tagmann as a software architect and programmer on implementing feature requests specific to the university workflow and on seamlessly integrating of Java-based campus management software. With all these customization done other universities started to get interested.

In another challenging project Oliver's team managed the migration process for the University of Applied Sciences in Biberach, with Oliver being the technical project lead. Gaining all that knowledge about Liferay, coding standards and big software packages in general and still learning something new each day using different open source frameworks I try to give something back to the community by helping others in the forums.

Gnaniyar Zubair

Gnaniyar Zubair is a Liferay Consultant at Raqmiyath, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, currently handling Saudi Ministry Portal. He has 5+ years of experience in Liferay Project Development. He has been involved in all the aspects of Liferay like Portal Migration, Third-Paty Integration with Liferay, Portal Administration & Portal Customization since 2007 and contributed in Liferay Forum, Wiki and the Liferay Marketplace. His goal is to automate the process for ease of development and he is the Translation leader for TAMIL language.

Recently, Gnaniyar contributed a WCM feature in Liferay for publishing any versions of the article and has been involved many R&D process which will be available soon in the Liferay Marketplace. Gnaniyar holds a M.C.A Computer Science from Manonmanium Sundranar University, Tirunelveli and born and brought up from Melapalayam, Tirunenveli. Gnaniyar maintains two blogs dedicated to Liferay: vforliferay and Share your knowledge.

Alexey Kakunin

Alexey Kakunin has been active in the community for quite some time and has done a lot of work contributing and maintaining the Liferay/Activiti integration, providing an open source choice when using workflow with Liferay. In addition, he has been very generous with code contributions (bugfixes and improvements) to Liferay Portal this quarter, over half the time providing fixes along with his bug reports. It's quite natural for him to give back to the community.

Alexey lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia, and when he's not skiing down a mountain, you can find his team contributing to our wonderful community.