Goal Met!
After some months, the project has received enough funding to be able to do a new full time hire! Thanks hugely to everyone who is supporting us, as your help has allowed us reaching this far!
Pedro Estebanez is still on track
Unfortunately, it was difficult for us (and him) to predict when the goal would be met so, due to timing issues, he recently got into a new paid contract with a client (Pedro has been the first of our contributors who became a professional Godot consultant, and works with many companies using the engine). This makes it impossible to for him to work with us for the time being. He still wishes from the bottom of his heart to eventually work full time for the project, so the next Patreon goal is still reserved for him.
George Marques
Some months ago, due to the growing amount of potential sponsors and donations, we had to discuss potential hires. The project is blessed with a large amount of absolutely brilliant contributors and it is our wish that as Godot keeps growing and securing more funding sources, we will be able to have more of them on board working full time. Hope this comes true in the coming years.
George is from Sao Paulo, Brazil. I had the pleasure of meeting him some months ago during the Big Festival (to where I was invited). He is part of the Godot project leadership comitee, along with me, Ariel Manzur, Rémi Verschelde, Julian Murgia and HP van Braam.
He is one of the longest standing and most reliable contributors and an excellent generalist. He is responsible for the UWP port, as well as a lot of improvements and fixes across the engine. He is the main contributor behind the GDScript rewrite for Godot 3.1, which now includes optional typing and a several quality of life improvements (he is the current GDSCript maintainer, along with Bojidar Marinov). Together with Rémi, George has also managed our activities related to Google Summer of Code, and has been present last year during the mentor summit. Thanks to their fantastic work on this area the project has managed to get more student slots granted this year.
Besides continued work on GDScript (on his schedule is the addition of typed instructions, which will massively improve run-time performance, and eventually compilation of scripts to C), he will work together with Rémi, our project manager, doing general bug-fixing and code reviews, helping alleviate our large bottleneck in this area.
On a side note, please remember that for C# support, Ignacio Roldán is already working full time for the project thanks to a generous grant from Microsoft.
Future
The bureaucratic part of the hire (he needs to sign with Software Freedom Conservancy) will take around a month or two, so he will effectively begin working in November. Meanwhile, we hope the level of donations stabilizes over the goal.
Our next Patreon goal is to be able to hire yet another generalist, so we added a new goal for this task, hoping we can finally hire Pedro this time. If you are not yet, please help us reach this goal by becoming a patron!