Hi Matt,
I’ve been programming (or teaching it) for a living for 20+ years. I wrote my first few plugins for WordPress in 2005 and started working with WordPress MU in early 2006. The merged WP/WPMU codebase I mentioned in October can be downloaded here: http://wpmututorials.com/hacks/community-service/. More recently, I developed buddymatic which was one of the demos in the theme plugin/competition at WordCamp NYC. I also have a sharded database plugin for MU (based on HyperDB) which will be released this month. The database plugin itself is done and in use on production installs. I’m currently working on a site admin tool for migrating an install from a single database to the sharded structure.
Buddymatic is great illustration of what I do best: approach problems & solutions from an unusual angle. (For other people reading the thread Buddymatic is a port of Thematic that has the BuddyPress theme functionality embedded in it that auto detects whether BP is active.) What I would like to do with bbPress is make it a canonical plugin. IMO, that’s the way to ensure its longevity and continued development.
