Hi All,
Please join me in welcoming Amir Aharoni as a Software Developer in
WMF’s Features Engineering team. Amir will be joining Niklas Laxstrom,
Santhosh Thottingal, Siebrand Mazeland and Gerard Meijssen on the
Internationalization / Localization features team to add RTL expertise
to build and improve language support tools and technologies for
reading and editing Wikipedia in all supported languages.
Amir was born in Moscow in 1980 and immigrated to Israel in 1991. He
speaks fluent Russian, Hebrew and English, as well as nearly fluent
Catalan and he can also read a few other languages, including Latin,
Lithuanian, Amharic and Malayalam. He's quite happy and proud about
all his different cultural backgrounds and identities and finds them
quite useful, too. He dreamt about being a linguist, an encyclopedia
and dictionary writer and a programmer since he was five years old.
Really. So, this opportunity makes his earliest childhood dreams come
true at one fell swoop.
Amir has two bookcases full of dictionaries and grammar books of
various languages and he keeps buying at least one dictionary of the
local language of every country he visits, as well as a couple of
fiction books to use the dictionaries with. He also still loves buying
CDs and vinyl records and has very little patience for e-book readers
and digital music players, especially if they have DRM features or
don't support all Unicode scripts. You will rarely catch him not
listening to music; he also plays the piano and can strum a couple of
guitar chords. Amir lived for several years in Haifa, the host of
Wikimania 2011, and now he lives in a village near Jerusalem. He
regularly blogs in Hebrew, English and Russian.
Amir is passionate about Free Software since he first heard about it
in a lecture in 1998. He has edited Wikipedia in several languages
since 2004, but the project about which he is most proud is editing
the heavily cross-referenced version of Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar at
the English Wikisource. He reported many MediaWiki bugs and sent a few
patches. He's a member of the Wikimedia Language committee and a board
member of Wikimedia Israel. He has zero patience for incorrectly
displayed right-to-left strings in any software, but you probably knew
that about him already (if you've met him in person).
Say hello to Amir online. He’s usually available on our favorite irc
channels including #mediawiki
Welcome Amir!
--
Alolita Sharma
Director, Features Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation