I met Raffaele Guidi on Twitter and I started following him because he's the original creator of Direct Memory, the first 100% free and OpenSource project that aims to implement an Off-Heap Java memory manager, competing with the commercial Terracotta's Big Memory.
So, I started becoming interested on the project evolvement as well as other smart guys - it was time to create a community around that!
So here we are, long live to Apache DirectMemory!