Hello all,
I’m delighted to announce that Ken Snider is joining the Wikimedia
operations team. He will start as an international contractor working
remotely from Toronto, Canada on June 10, and will be visiting SF in
the week of June 17. We’re currently in the process of seeking work
authorization in the United States in the Director of TechOps
position.
CT has graciously agreed to support the ops leadership transition
full-time through June, and part-time through July. We’ll be starting
the handover while Ken is working remotely.
A bit more about Ken: Ken was apparently genetically predisposed to
become a sysadmin since he joined one of Canada’s first large ISPs,
Primus, straight out of school in 1997 and helped build their
infrastructure til 2001. He then joined a startup called OpenCOLA in
2001 which was co-founded by Cory Doctorow and developed early P2P
precursors to tools like BitTorrent and Steam. It’s best known today
for the development of an open source (GPL’d) cola recipe which is
still in use (more than 150,000 cans sold if Wikipedia is to be
believed).
Ken got involved in one of Cory’s pet projects,
BoingBoing.net which
some of you may have heard of ;-), and has been their sysadmin since
2003. After a stint from 2001-2005 at DataWire, Ken became Director of
Tech Ops at Federated Media, a role he held from 2005-2012.
Federated Media is an ad network that was founded to support high
traffic blogs and sites that want to stay independent of large
publishers, with a network that supports more than 1B requests/day.
One of the unusual challenges at FM was that the company grew through
acquisitions of various blogging and publishing networks. This led to
the challenge of integrating very heterogeneous operations and
engineering infrastructure, including multiple geographically
distributed ops teams and data-center locations. As DTO, Ken led these
efforts, such as OS standardization, development of a unified
deployment infrastructure, etc. Ken also ensured that the operations
group partnered effectively with the various engineering teams
developing site features and enhancements.
I want to again take this opportunity to thank CT Woo for his tireless
operations leadership since December 2010. I’d also like to thank
everyone who’s participated in the Director of TechOps search process.
Please join me in welcoming Ken to the Wikimedia Foundation and the
community. :-)
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation