An Interview with Al

Article by Paulie

I recently conducted an interview with CL9 AL regarding his promotion to the Head of InDev, his past at the Outpost and his plans for the Department now under his leadership.

BR: Perhaps we should first delve into your personal history at the Outpost. How long have you been here?

AL:I joined TF under the Handle "JKAD" before it became OTF back in December 1997, so that's been 18 years now. Incredible to imagine the place is still around and alive and kicking!

BR: What inspired you to look for a chatroom congregate in, such as this one? How did you find OTF?

AL:I was actually introduced by another Star Trek fan that went to school with me. I was more into Star Wars than Star Trek at the time, whick is why in 1999 I helped create the CCC.

BR: Where did the desire to stay come from?

AL: I stayed around back then because I had made a bunch of great friends and just has lots of great times.

BR: What's different about your life now , then all those years ago?

AL:After I married Katrina in 2002 I started visiting the Chat less, and in the decade that followed we'd drop in on occasion, but not with much regularity. We did come back around a bit in 2009, but I think it was around 2013 that we made a more permanent return.

Since 2013, I've been using the web development expertise I've built up via my job to help fix up and improve the place, ultimately putting me in the InDev position I am now. So the reason I stay around is a combination of nostalgia (I'd hate to see the place disappear), the pleasure of chatting with friends we've made the past few years, and as I mentioned, I like using my expertise to just make the place better in various little ways.

BR: How did you become head of InDev?

AL:I was offered the position by the previous director Ohm., as a result of doing a number of projects on the team as a member. We'd gotten to the point where I'd routinely ask for his help/permission to add or improve some site feature and since he had less free time to spend on OTF, he felt it more appropriate for me to take over, which I was happy to accept.

BR: What are you immediate responsibilities in your new position?

AL:There's a list of things on the InDev to do list and I'm sue more will be added. My priority is to make the chat in particular as pleasant and enjoyable to use as I can., using various methods. Thanks to  number of browser advances in the past decadeas well as inspiration gleamed from the chats interfaces on sites like Facebook and GoogleTalk, there's a number of things we've been able to do.

As more and more people are chatting at OTF using their phones and tablets, a big thing on our radar is making the chats work better on mobile devices. Hopefully that's something we can accomplish within the first half of this year. Other things include fixing bugs and broken site features and finding other ways to upgrade the site to better fit into the  internet of today and better attract new visitors.

BR: I had no idea that OTF was going to expand into mobile territory. I mean I have a smartphone, but i;m not sure that it would even occur to me to access OTF from it. Tell us more about that if you can?

AL:Well we've noticed that more and more people do indeed use thier phones to chat with, most likely because they're away from their computer or perhaps even don't have one. Currently using the chat works, but it requires quite a bit of zooming in and out and scrolling around since it's designed for big screens. So we'd like to have a mobile-specific interface that's optimized for smaller screens and make chatting a little easier. This would still be through the web browser though, not OTF Apps are planned at this point.

BR: Thanks for your Time!

AL: My pleasure