Andrii Vasyliev, @hiqsol joined Yii team. Andrii uses Yii daily for his team projects and is very interested in framework moving forward.
He's from Kiev, Ukraine and is part of HiQDev team same as another long term Yii team member, Dmytro Naumenko (@SilverFire).
His primary focus will be refreshing Yii architecture splitting it into more packages to achieve more frequent independent releases and making Yii core more robust.