We have an exciting announcement to make. Daniel, aka Diafygi, will be joining the Fitocracy team! He’ll be moving to New York to join us in mid-May, but will begin remotely in a few weeks. Daniel is an early user who has been involved with Fitocracy from the start.

I remember the first time he reached out to us late last year. Daniel introduced himself as a chemical engineer from Houston and told us that he was spending an unusual amount of time thinking about Fitocracy (which gave him instant geek karma with us). Furthermore, he expressed interest in joining the team. Honestly, Brian and I did not know what to think, and we were not so keen on the idea at the start. But Daniel kept offering up his feedback by sending us emails on a weekly basis with his ideas on the activities and point systems (often involving some form of calculus and/or math that was way over our heads). I remember one day, Brian and I were dealing with a particularly tricky problem regarding the potential of “gaming” certain rep ranges. We reached out to Daniel for help, and within 10 minutes, he got on Skype and showed us a brilliant, sophisticated solution in a spreadsheet with magnificent three-dimensional visuals of different rep ranges. We quickly knew then that we wanted him on board, though neither Brian or myself wanted pull the trigger and move forward just yet.

So Daniel, being the persistent person that he is, hopped on a plane en route to New York (actually he was going there because of work, but that makes the story seem less cool) and pitched his abilities to us over brunch. We chatted about where we saw Fitocracy going and how he could add value to the team and our vision. After spending the day with Daniel, which included a game of tackle football with other startup folks in NY, as well as some beers that Daniel home-brewed, we were extremely impressed and wanted to move forward.

In the coming months, Daniel will be focusing much of his efforts on revamping our point/activities algorithm and working on the ability to graph your progress over time. Look for some huge improvements to be made shortly in those areas. He’s also an avid runner and will help reinforce our commitment to improving our cardio activities. As if he weren’t great enough already, he also codes python/django, so we essentially have another developer as well to speed up our new features.

Please give him a warm welcome to the Fitocracy team!