It’s hard not to throw too many bouquets at our Desktop Team. The Mendeley Desktop is at the heart of Mendeley as a referencing tool, the first thing you download after signing up to use Mendeley. The Desktop team is always hard at work iterating and improving the Desktop App — you can always read the release notes on our website to know the latest and greatest. Recently, the team worked together with several other teams here to introduce support for importing articles in MEDLINE format, to enable better bulk importing from PubMed. This is useful for medical researchers, who use this for systematic literature reviews. The team is already working with beta testers on the next iteration of Mendeley Desktop, a version that paves the way for our iOS and Android apps!

Vincent Delannoy — Team Lead

Vincent’s past positions are, in order: military Flight simulator, phone operator, finance, visual arts, mobile phones, maps, finance, finance, video, research. What finally led him to London is the french immigration services, and Londoners in general.

What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

As a team leader, I’m responsible for the well being of the team. That includes writing code, communicating with other teams to solve cross-team issues, promote good practices, promoting projects that will make the desktop code better, more scalable and easier to understand for new starters, taking decisions when there is no consensus on what to do.

What is your favourite part about working for Mendeley?

A happy team

What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

baby sitting / playing music / drawing / painting

George Kartvelishvili —Senior Software Engineer

George was born in Tbilisi, Georgia back in the Soviet days. He developed his love of computers from an early age due to his dad’s ZX-81 and Atari ST. He moved to England with his family in the mid-nineties and studied Computer Science (BSs) and Advanced Computer Science (MSc) at the University of Manchester. Soon after graduating, he headed down to London to seek his fortune and adventures in the games industry. After 10+ years as a graphics and gameplay programmer creating electronic entertainment for PC and consoles in a variety of companies including Rockstar Games, he decided to join the thriving London startup scene. He joined Mendeley in 2012 and is now busy maintaining and improving the desktop client.

How do you describe your role on the Desktop Team?

My role involves looking after the workings of our Mendeley Desktop client. This has mostly involved extending and improving the user interface and a large chunk of behind the scenes work.

What is your favourite part about working for Mendeley?

My favourite part of working in Mendeley is the casual friendly atmosphere about the place and the underlying feeling that I might be doing something just a little bit good for the progress of science.

What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

I do a fair bit of “recreational” programming, enjoy a good bit of DIY and I like travelling and tasting the local cuisines of the world. Although, recently my life has gotten a lot more interesting and my spare time is mostly filled with rocking a baby to sleep and changing nappies.

Robert Knight — Senior Software Engineer

Rob studied Computer Science at Southampton University. During that time he was a contributor to the KDE desktop for Linux. Arrived at Mendeley via a recommendation from an employee he met at their annual aKademy conference.
Connect with him at Twitter @robknight_.

How do you describe your role on the Desktop Team?

I work on all areas of the desktop app across all platforms. I work on end user facing features to make the app a more useful, and hopefully delightful, tool for researchers to use, as well as infrastructure to help us improve and maintain the stability of the app and deliver updates to users.

What is your favourite part about working for Mendeley?

I like working on a tool that makes a difference in people’s working lives and makes them more productive researchers. It’s also great to be in the heart of London’s busy tech scene.

What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

I run and cycle with my local athletics club and hack on various open source projects to keep myself in the loop about new and evolving technology.

Carles Pina — Software Engineer

Carles was born and grew up in Manresa, near Barcelona. He studied computer engineering in Barcelona, worked at Elvior (Estonia) and Lexatel Technologies (Barcelona). He was involved in Linux User Groups in Catalonia and collaborated in different free software projects. In June 2009, Carles moved to London to join Mendeley. Connect with him online at his homepage and a blog.

How do you describe your role on the Desktop Team?

We all implement features and fix bugs. I always try to improve the CSL (Citation Style Language, used for citations and bibliographies) integration with Mendeley.

What is your favourite part about working for Mendeley?

Make our users happy helping them to be more productive. Seeing that users like Mendeley, find it useful, etc
Another really good part is the colleagues in the office.

What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

In no particular order: programming (usually Python outside working hours, for a change), play table tennis, hiking (recently I finished the London LOOP), travelling…

Arnau Josep Rosselló Castelló — C++ Developer

Monday was literally Arnau’s first day! His background is in the games industry and finance (yes, both).