Hi everyone,
I think it’s about time to introduce myself. I’m Johannes ([joˈhanəs]).
I’ve been a regular member of the community for quite some time and most recently had the honour to join the core team. I’m really excited about that and looking forward to it - and all the good stuff coming in 2019 =)
My first exposure to Crystal was almost two years ago. I’m not exactly sure how, but I somehow stumbled upon it reading about alternatives to Ruby with more performance. I had quickly taken a look at Go, but I found it ugly to write (the upside of that, as I’ve learned is, that it’s easy to comprehend even without extensive knowledge of the language).
What hooked me on Crystal initially was that it even outperformed Go in some benchmarks - and that with a beautiful syntax! After getting more involved however, I realized that actually features like union types and nil-handling make the language really great. Good performance is just an added bonus (but obviously a strong selling point to get people interested, as it worked for me).
I pretty soon started a larger project in Crystal: crinja and it helped my very much in getting used to the language. It also stressed some aspects so in the process I discovered some compiler bugs, which got me involved with the compiler and stdlib.
I’ve been mostly working on higher-levels such as user-facing APIs and documentation, and will continue in these areas. Through Crystal I’ve also learned much about lower-level stuff (like C APIs, OS integration, linking, LLVM etc.) - much more than they tought in CS courses at university. Still, some parts of the compiler are still labled “here be dragons”, in my head, though =)
It’s a joy to work with Crystal and contribute to make it better, and I especially like the community of really awesome people, like you!
A main part of my life is doing science with computers, both professionally and voluntary work for open-source and non-profits. I play handball and several musical instruments (guitar, bass, cajón, also doing some audio engineering) and I’m engaged as a leader in local youth ministry. When there is some free time, I enjoy playing board and card games with my friends (for example Doppelkopf - or Skat if we’re short on one).
I realize that most of this post is less about introducing me, but a laudation to Crystal. I’m fine with that 
