The MyBB member with the highest post count, and most well known for his abundant amount of support and knowledge, Matt Rogowski, took some time out to answer your questions.
Please tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m 18 and live in rural Norfolk in England, UK. I don’t speak like half the people up here (which is just as well as a lot of them are very hard to understand!!) as I used to live in Essex. The sort of music I like is Jimmy Eat World, Ash, Paramore, that sort of thing, and I like to watch shows like Lost, Heroes, Flash Forward, Scrubs, Top Gear, CSI and motorsport on TV. I went to college (that’s not the same as what college is across the pond, college here is when you’re 16-18, then after that you have university, 18-23+) but didn’t do too well so I got a job instead of continuing with education. I got a job working for a company that provides software/hardware primarily for use by the NHS. I work with PHP/MySQL which is helping to improve my skills. It’s a different working environment to most other jobs as we’re a few miles from any main roads or built up areas, so it’s dead quiet and an amazing place to work, plus the other people there are great.
Why made you so passionate about MyBB?
I’d had a little bit of experience with forums before, I’d been a regular poster on some for a few years, and eventually I decided to have a go at making one myself and signed up to some of the free hosting services where you get a subdomain address, but they never went very far. I talked to the admin of one of the forums I went on, which was running MyBB 1.2 at the time, and he offered me free hosting, and I started using MyBB then. I didn’t have FTP access to begin with so I changed to a normal host, but the forum didn’t get anywhere, and I ended up removing it. However I already knew I liked MyBB a lot so started posting on the community forums, started to like it even more, began to help people with issues they were having and got better at that as time went on, and here we are today. I really liked finding something I’m good at and that helps others, and I hope I can only do more in the future. I think what the MyBB team, past and present, has achieved is brilliant, I’m very happy to be a part of it, and I cannot wait for 2.0.
What is your favourite gadget and why?
I love gadgets, I’m the person in my house who’s called for to help someone with whatever piece of gadgetry they’re having trouble with, and I have loads of them in various places in my room, but my favourite is my iPod Touch. I only have a 1st Gen one but it does me, I can have videos, loads of apps and all my music, plus internet and email, so I’ve always got something to do on it. There’s been many times I’ve charged it over night and by the evening the battery is well into the red zone. I’d like to get an iPhone or something but the prices are just too high; it’s (slightly more) affordable if it’s on contract but I’ve never liked the idea of that, and to buy it by itself and pay-as-you-go is £440 ($720) for a 16GB model, same as my iPod, and I can’t justify that expense for what I’d use it for. A more reasonable upgrade might be to get the next iPod Touch when they include a camera and/or 3G, which could happen. An iPhone would be good as everything I already have would be able to be ported across, and I’d already know how to use it. I quite like the look of an Android phone too, especially the newly announced Google Nexus One, however I rarely actually make calls with my phone so it’s probably not worth it, I’d just be getting it for the sake of having the latest gadget. I don’t really use my PlayStation much any more, racing games are the only thing I’m any good at but they wear thin after a while, unless I manage to hook it up to the net and play online, although with my internet connection I can’t see that happening any time soon!! I’ll probably be getting a MacBook soon and I’m sure that’ll become my favourite gadget. I also seem to love USB sticks, but don’t ask why, as I have no idea. I hardly ever read instruction manuals, only if I get some sort of critical error using something and think it’s probably best to read it.
What are some of your pet hates?
People driving with their fog lights on, be it when it’s broad daylight or dark, but when there’s no fog. I don’t think they understand they can be quite blinding, they are designed to help you see in fog after all. Similarly, I don’t like people who take ages to turn their beam off despite the fact you’re flashing at them. I also hate it when ppl tlk lyk ths nd use numbrs like ‘I wnt 2 do dis m8’.
If you could have any feature you wanted implemented into MyBB by default, what would it be?
A WYSIWYG editor. Not. I would love to see an official integration with WordPress; not a feature as such but I can’t really think of any big features that are missing. I think linking a forum and blog is good but I don’t think we should waste time writing our own blog when, realistically, WordPress is going to be a whole lot better and already has a large user base with lots of plugins and themes, and we don’t have to spend time writing, testing, and maintaining it, when we should be writing, testing and maintaining what MyBB actually is, an awesome forum system. I hope we don’t go down the social route with profile comments and personal photo galleries etc; if people want their users to be able to make their own blog, it would be better to hook it up with WordPress MU, making use of WordPress again, but I think that would be enough. Don’t redesign the wheel, integrate with what’s already available.
What is your dream career?
When I was growing up I had the sorts of dream jobs everyone wanted to have, footballer, racing driver, astronaut, but none of those are realistic for most of us. I then went through a stage of wanting to do a trade, such as being a plumber or electrician, more realistic. However I then started getting into a bit of web design etc, and then joined MyBB. Now I want to end up being a professional programmer, and although I’m still new to it, I think that can easily happen. It sort of already has with me getting a job working with PHP/MySQL, which is going really well, and the more I do the better I’m getting. One of my aims for MyBB is to code something that goes into 2.0, no matter how small, and I really hope that happens. One thing I really need to learn is all the MyBB functions, as well as OOP. Right now OOP makes no sense to me, but then again a few months ago all the PHP I know well made the same amount of sense as OOP does now so maybe in a while I’ll crack it.
The person/people in the world I’d most like to meet is…
Jeremy Clarkson and James May. I’ve been a few feet away from Clarkson but haven’t ‘met’ him as such. I also think it would be quite funny to meet Boris Johnson. I’d quite like to meet Jimmy Eat World and Paramore too actually.
Show us your (real) desktop!
Nothing special, haven’t got enough room for another monitor, may need to reorganise some stuff. Hardly use my printer so I’m sure that can more somewhere and I can get another monitor in.
Other than MyBB, what are some of your hobbies?
I don’t have time to do anything during the week really, too tired after work, so I only really have the weekends. I’m not very sporty, I only really did sport as school because I had to. I used to do quite a lot of cycling if that counts as a sport though, I had to cycle two miles to and from school every day for 3 years which kept me relatively fit, but now that I have a car I drive everywhere, and have outgrown my bike; it was fine when I was 5’6″ but now that I’m around 6’4″ it gets a bit hard to use. I guess my biggest hobby, if you can call it a hobby, is driving. I have a 1987 BMW which I love, it drives great (and sounds great as there’s a hole in the exhaust somewhere, hehe), and I love driving about in it, especially around all the great country roads we have here. I wanted something a bit different to what people usually get as a first car, and as my dad had the same model I do, just the next engine size up, new from 1985, it was the best choice.
What superpower would you have if you were a superhero?
Super vision. Thermal imaging/infra-red/night vision, heat vision, x-ray vision, the ability to zoom in to something miles away and see it clearly… I think that would be awesome.
Anything else you would like to add?
You can find me on my small site, Twitter and Facebook. If you add me on Twitter, @ reply me with your MyBB username, and if you add me on Facebook, leave a message on the add friend page, just so I know who you are. 🙂
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