Why we call it a "community"

It’s almost a habit — when we talk about people who use Movable Type, we say “the Movable Type community.” And people who don’t spend a lot of time surfing the web exploring blogs might scoff: “If everybody who uses software makes up a community, how come I never hear about the Norton Anti-Virus community?”

So it’s worth sharing just one of the many stories that makes the Movable Type community something special. Meet Arvind Satyanarayan. He’s the publisher of Movalog, the blog for all things Movable Type, and the creator of a number of the most popular Movable Type plugins in the world, including Privacy, his newest effort, and stalwarts such as Blogroll, LivePreview, EnhancedEntryEditing. Arvind’s also been a key driver behind efforts like the The Style Contest and tools like The Style Generator.

And Arvind is 17 years old, living in the United Arab Emirates.

Now here’s the thing — every tech community has its token Young Person. You can point to a standout whiz kid who does something cool with software and everybody says “aww, that’s so cute!” But this is where the Movable Type community takes that tech cliché and turns it into something really special.

Because, with the help of the rest of the community, Arvind’s been able to raise his skills to the next level. To tell the truth, when Arvind started IMing me a few years ago, I guessed he was just another kid who was maybe a Ben Trott fanboy and basically thought “That’s nice, but we’re pretty busy.” But through the diligent support of people on our team like our senior software engineer lead MT gearhead Brad Choate, Arvind’s picked up some pretty strong technical chops.

More to the point, the community outside Six Apart has been instrumental as well. Elise Bauer, the recipe maven responsible for Simply Recipes created the seminal Learning Movable Type site years ago, but many of the most popular and valuable tutorials on the site were created as a collaboration with Arvind.

All around the world

So what you see is Elise, a veteran of Silicon Valley who lives in California and maintains a massively popular blog, collaborating with a kid in the U.A.E. to educate an entire globe of bloggers about what’s possible.

It doesn’t end there. When Arvind needed an endorsement for his college applications, our Product Manager Byrne Reese led the charge. The Style Contest was an effort by many in the community, but a lot of the key collaboration happened between Arvind, Elise, and noted ProNet community member Jesse Gardner, who’s based in Pennsylvania. People all over the world have partnered with Arvind to make Movable Type do things we’d never even imagined.

And that support has helped Arvind take it to the next level. Customers for his plugins include some of the biggest companies in the world — think of some of the largest tech companies who are blogging, and you’ll probably see Arvind’s work behind the scenes. We’re also thrilled to announce that Arvind is the newest intern at Six Apart, helping with (what else!) improving our community efforts around the Movable Type plugin directory and our Professional Network.

That’s just part of the story, and of course we haven’t even gotten into dozens of examples of other work Arvind’s done, or other community members who’ve been similarly impressive and inspiring to us. But we thought one story of one Movable Type blogger going from “that kid in Dubai who IMs us in the middle of the night” to a valued member of the team shows what our community is all about.