DZone is proud to announce our newest team members, Lowell Heddings, DZone Sheriff; Stacy Doss, DZone Ambassador; Tim Yates, Linkmaster General; and Daniel Spiewak. These individuals have provided countless hours of support, work and dedication to DZone, and we felt that it was time to bring them on board officially.

Lowell Heddings is a Senior Software Engineer during the day, but as DZone Sheriff he is responsible for maintaining the quality of the content on DZone. Although each team member has the ability to block or edit any of the submitted content, Lowell is ultimately responsible for removing spam posts, editing middle-man links, and general quality control for the site. Lowell estimates that a dozen or more spam links are blocked on a daily basis.

Stacy Doss, a Integration Engineer by day, focuses on promoting the site and specifying new features, while occasionally doing a little coding. Stacy envisions site improvement then discusses them with the staff to refine both the specification and feasibility of particular features. Stacy will be writing a weekly blog entry where he will review links of interest from the past week. Also known as “3Monkeys”, Stacy has been an active member in the social networking world for some time. Specifically he was a top contributor at digg, but became more interested in the DZone model.

Tim Yates writes bioinformatics tools and develops websites in addition to being DZones Linkmaster General. Also known as bloid, Tim is a link posting machine. Able to search out obscure articles from a wide variety of sources, Tim has long been the top contributor at DZone. Tim has posted in excess of 2500 links so far, and over 1000 of them have been promoted. Tim also writes code for the site from time to time, so you may notice his handiwork around the site.

Daniel Spiewak, although officially one of the Editors at our EclipseZone.com site, is also a very active member of the DZone team. Daniel is a student at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and is an independent programming contractor. He provides a variety of services for DZone including link moderation and feature development.

Again, we welcome these contributors and hope they are only the first of a growing DZone team.

DZone has recently acquired http://bigbold.com/snippets and has launched snippets.dzone.com. Snippets is a web repository of programming code snippets. It uses a similar tagging system as DZone and was developed in Ruby on Rails. The team is working on a site redesign to more closely match the traditional DZone look and feel. Feel free to take it for a test drive in the mean time.

Peter Cooper posted on the sell at Ruby Inside:

I wasn’t really in the market to sell Code Snippets, but while talking on the phone with a friend, he mentioned he might be interested. I gave it some thought and thought his offer was pretty good. Before saying ‘yes’, I decided to do some research with a few other contacts to see if I could get a better offer. Quick as a flash, Rick Ross at DZone got me on the phone and agreed a sale within minutes. It is easy to see how well it integrates with their stuff, so I think we’re both happy!

All in all, the sell brings in over 3000 snippets, and 5000 registered users.

DZone users can view the latest snippets directly from the DZone main page, as we’ve integrated the snippet site feed on the sidebar. Comments and suggestions on integrating the new site are always welcome.

In trying to provide even better service to our users, DZone is in the process of revamping our blogs. Not only will the official blog blogs.dzone.com/dzone become more of a source of information regarding DZone news and happenings, but editors will have their own blogs to impart information from any of the various Zones. Look for more news and announcements over the next few weeks.