Staff Snapshots: Daniel Harold

Daniel Harold is one of the many behind-the-scenes people who keeps Hymnary humming. Among a myriad of daily duties for Daniel is reviewing and testing the code written by other developers to make sure it will work well before it is deployed to Hymnary.org. This could be anything from code that adds new features to bug fixes. He's also responsible for properly working servers, automatic backups, disk space and much, much more. 

Daniel, a Calvin computer science graduate who originally hails from the Detroit area, has been with Hymnary for almost three years and prior to coming on board worked on our sister site, preachingandworship.org, as a student intern. At Hymnary, he likes being able to work on a web site that is used by so many people, noting that he often meets people outside of work who have used Hymnary.org.

"In fact," he notes, "on a recent mission trip in Japan, our missionary host said he regularly uses Hymnary.org." He also likes working on a team with "other developers who are great at troubleshooting and determining how to make any changes we need to make to the site."

He appreciates the database format of Hymnary (and how it seeks to store as much information as possible about individual hymnals and how hymns appear in them) and the fact that anyone with an Internet connection and web browser can search the database. The melody search feature for finding hymns whose names aren't known is also a favorite feature.

Daniel also strongly believes in Hymnary's ability to preserve the tradition of hymns. "It helps us hold on to theology-rich songs that may be lost sooner if they were only preserved on paper," he says.