---
title: Welcome 2023!
summary: The new year comes with lots of good news.
thumbnail: +
author: beta-ziliani
comment_href: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/crystal-lang/welcome_2023_18/
categories: project
tags: [people, core-team]
---

Hello everyone, and happy New Year! We’re kicking off 2023 with some exciting changes that we want to share with you.

We took some steps towards strengthening the Crystal team, and first of those is that George Dietrich ([@Blacksmoke16](https://github.com/Blacksmoke16)) joined the Core Team. He has been a Community Moderator since November 2021, is one of the authors of the [Crystal Programming book](https://crystal-lang.org/learning/crystal_programming/), and has done a great job at managing issues and discussions. You can see him helping out newcomers as well as more experienced users on the discord and forum.

On the Manas side of things, Core Team member Quinton Miller ([@HertzDevil](https://github.com/HertzDevil)), who has been working at Manas since August 2022 in different projects, will now be on the Crystal team full-time.

Further support comes in the form of a dedicated Community Manager. After a long search, we found the right person for the job: Mekhla will be joining us in February. Stay tuned for a proper introduction.

A larger team requires more fine-grained responsibilities, and for that we are also promoting Johannes Müller ([@straight-shoota](https://github.com/straight-shoota)) to the role of Principal Engineer. This also comes as a recognition to his amazing work at keeping the Crystal ecosystem tight.

In other news, we’re working on a new initiative that will allow the community to interact with the Core Team in a more direct way to voice their preferences in terms of prioritizing what the Team will be working on. More details soon to be revealed!

And the last news is old news: keeping with our release schedule, we will release Crystal 1.7 on January 9th.

We are very thankful for another year of working together with this fantastic community in developing a programming language that has brought us so much joy.
