You may soon notice one fewer diamond around the site. The amazing developer, tech lead, and community advocate
Yaakov Ellis - user 51(!) - has taken an opportunity elsewhere and today, December 7th, 2023, is the end of over 10 years working for Stack Overflow. When he shared this with me, I offered to write a post here to share with you all. I invite you all to join me in appreciating Yaakov.
Despite his 10 years here, you might not have been aware of him until he requested to move from the Internal Development team to the public platform team in early 2019. Nearly all of his >60k reputation here on MSE has been earned over those last four years as he immediately dove into directly working with and communicating to the community, quickly becoming a fixture and trusted voice. You can check out his rep chart to see this directly:
But reputation alone can't speak to the work Yaakov has done over those four years. As a developer, he's worked on numerous projects to update existing UI, create new features and tools, and respond to bugs - but he's devoted himself to working with the community directly throughout it all, wanting to ensure that the community was heard and got to have some fun.
I can't understate the efforts he's gone to, to redirect the company's thinking about the value of the Meta community by providing key data about who uses Meta, pushing for early and frequent discussions in public about upcoming work, and organizing community advocacy on development teams. His honesty and perseverance has helped bolster the Community Team as he holds a position of trust with many core community members while also having the ears of key figures within Stack Overflow.
On top of that, he led some of the most beloved opportunities for fun in recent years, most notably being the primary developer for Winter Bash for several years - where he spent much extra time coming up with fun - sometimes secret - activities for the most devoted WB fans. I can certainly say, the last few years of adventuring with Sparkles the Unicorn have made for a very exciting event.
Finally, I'll end this in the way Yaakov ended many of his posts, which I must assume is his preferred mode of communication and dates back to his
first answer here on MSE:
A stressful year ends.
So too, your time at SO.
Forever a friend.
