Hello, DZone contributors! With February in the rearview mirror, we thought we'd share a recap of the month in terms of awesome contributors, company news, publication releases, and top posts.

Read on for our February retrospective. 

February Leaderboards

Congrats to all the contributors atop the leaderboards for February. You made it a great month to be a DZone reader!

Top Contributors by Pageviews for February 2017

Top Contributors by Articles for February 2017

Monthly Highlights

The 2017 Kickoff Contest ended on February 12th. Thanks to everyone who participated, and congratulations to the winners. You can check out the full contest recap and winners' list here. Stay tuned for our next contest, which will be announced this month.

We launched a number of publications in February, including the DZone Guide to the Cloud: Native Deployment and Development. So far, the Guide has received nearly six thousand downloads. In addition, we released the Refcardz listed below. Thank you to all of our Guide and Refcard authors for sharing their knowledge with the DZone community.

• Core Python (Updated)

• Scrum (Updated)

• .NET on Linux (New)

Meet Our New Zone Leader

Say hello to Chris Ward aka Chris Chinchilla aka Gregarious Mammal! Our newest Zone Leader is a man of many names and many talents. He will be focused primarily on the Mobile and DevOps Zones, but he’s open to doing a variety of coverage.

His blog bio says: “After 15 years as a developer I realized that my skills lie in helping others understand technical subjects. I achieve this through technical writing, blogging, networking, and educating people through presentations and workshops.” We can't wait to read and share more of his content!

Editors' Picks

Congrats to Zone Leader Grzegorz Ziemonski, who had a great month in terms of pageviews. His article "The Human Side of DevOps" was the most-viewed post of the month, receiving more than 74K pageviews. The other top articles for the month were:

• "Most Useful Linus Command Line Tools" by seco max (33K PVs)
• "Interface Enhancement in Java 8" by Arun Pandey (30K PVs)
• "Python vs PHP vs Ruby: A Detailed Comparison" by Prateek Tiwari (28K PVs)
• "A Java 8 Streams Cookbook" by Martin Farrell (27K PVs)

We'd like say thanks to Jitendra Bafna, who has written a bunch of awesome tutorials related to integration and has gotten some great and insightful comments from our readers. Check out his posts here.

Zone Leader Tim Spann has been writing a fantastic series on the subject. All three (so far) of his Deep Learning and Machine Learning Guide posts offer tons of helpful resources for the aspiring machine learning expert. Start your education with Part I.

Hoverboard crash survivor, MVB, and IoT security specialist Wilfred Nilsen has a new post, "Cheaper Alternatives to IoT Cloud Services," which is particularly relevant in light of the recent AWS S3 outage.

Awesome New MVBs

We're very pleased to announce that Dan Newton, aka Lanky Dan, has officially joined our MVB ranks. His name might look familiar from the 2017 Kickoff Contest Leaderboards - he was the Week 2 second place winner and the 4th place winner overall! Expect to see more of Dan's writing in our Java Zone soon.

RxJava fans, rejoice! We've got a brand new MVB named Pierce Zaifman who is primarily posting tutorials specifically for Android devs...lots of which explain the ins and outs of RxJava. Welcome, Pierce!