Welcome David Schoonover - Systems Engineer - Data Analytics - Wikitech-l

13 Feb 2012

Hi everyone,

I'm pleased to welcome a new member of our analytics engineering team.
 David Schoonover starts today in the San Francisco office[1] as our
new Systems Engineer for Data Analytics. David previously worked
remotely for a company in McLean, VA in Virginia's Silicon...thing
(not valley, forest or alley...what do they call it?  "Silicon road to
Dulles"?).  Anyway, David's work was at  Clearspring, the company
responsible for the AddThis sharing widget that's installed across 10+
million domains servicing 60k+ requests per second.  He and a
co-worker built a scalable real-time analytics system to power the
Share Count feature of their tools, which is part of a real-time
dashboard you get as a user of their service.

In addition to David's talent in database technology and software
engineering, David also adds to our growing team of capable
photographers in Platform Engineering.  Because, after all, every good
engineering organization should have plenty of great photographers.

I've also found David will immediately will draw a dinosaur[2] on a
whiteboard in whatever room he is in.  So, those of you in our SF
office, if you see a plesiosaur on the whiteboard near you, that
probably means he's been there recently.  Or maybe it's been there a
while but now won't erase.  Either way, he probably drew it.

David will be joining Andrew Otto and Erik Zachte in the analytics
group in Platform Engineering, working very closely with Diederik van
Liere from Howie's new Product Management team.  David, Andrew and
Diederik (along with contractor Fabian Kaelin) are working on fixing
up our reporting pipeline and report card.

Welcome David!

Rob

[1] Yes, that's right, I've actually hired another person in San
Francisco, and this time, I didn't have to convince him to move here.
When I have team meetings, I'll have to get a conference room with
THREE chairs.  And a good phone.
[2] Dinosaur samples: http://art.less.ly/dinosaurs/