Hello all,

It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing that Terrence (Terry) Chay is joining the Wikimedia Foundation as Director of Features Engineering.

Terry comes to us from Automattic, where he helped improve the WordPress.com user experience by implementing an A/B testing framework, improving the blog domain name registration process (which contributed to doubling the revenue for WordPress.com), creating better support mechanisms for fist-time users, and making many other changes. In that role, he was an individual contributor to the WordPress codebase.

Before Automattic, Terry worked as an engineering manager and software architect for multiple start-ups and tech companies between 1999 and 2009, most recently at Tagged and Plaxo. He has a B.S. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

If you’ve ever been to OSCON, you may have seen Terry present one of his infamous PHP talks there (he’s been invited back repeatedly for some reason). All in, he’s given more than 25 public talks about web development. He’s also a prolific blogger and photographer ( http://terrychay.com/ ), joining the nascent photography cabal at Wikimedia.

As Director of Features Engineering, Terry will be responsible for helping ensure the success of some of our key feature teams: the visual editor team, the editor engagement team (including the article feedback project), and the fundraising engineering team.

This announcement also means that Alolita Sharma will be transitioning into a new director-level role at the Wikimedia Foundation. While we’ve not finalized all details, the role will include responsibility for the internationalization team, for experimental features projects and technology evaluation. We’ll announce details about that shortly. I want to thank Alolita for her track record of excellent leadership at Wikimedia to-date.

Terry's first day will be February 27. Please join me in welcoming Terry to the Wikimedia movement. :-)

All best, Erik