This week marks the end of Jan, Paul and me spending our days at Mendeley HQ all by our lonesome. Beause this week, dear readers, we are joined by our new software engineer Mike Arthur whom we managed to snatch from the claws of British Telecom! That’s him there, on the right.

Mike has signed up for our mission to develop Mendeley into the best tool there is for managing, discovering and sharing research. His expertise in Qt and C++ (the development framework and language we’re using) will be a great help towards achieving that goal. What else can we tell you about him? For one, he claims to be Scottish. I can’t testify as to the veracity of this statement, since both kilt and bagpipe remain conspicuously absent (he’s a very talented Jazz bass player, though). Besides, he is devoting a lot of his free time to open source development, especially for the K Desktop Environment (KDE).

One amusing bit: When he came in for the job interview, it was already quite late at night and I hadn’t had dinner yet. The only thing edible in reach were two juicy mangoes which I had brought to the office that day. I was happily munching the mangoes while we talked to him, and I offered him some slices, too. He declined, and I thought he was merely being polite because he didn’t want to eat during a job interview. So I kept pushing the mango slices over to him, and he kept refusing. In the end, he asked us whether having to eat mangoes was actually a job requirement – he didn’t like them. You may think that’s silly, but the notion that someone could possibly not like my favourite fruit in the world had previously been inconceivable to me. Mike is the only person I know that doesn’t like mangoes.

Welcome to Mendeley, Mike. We’re glad you’re here!