Hi everyone,
I'm pleased to announce Andrew Otto will be coming to Wikimedia
Foundation as a software developer in Platform Engineering, focused on
analytics. We've been hiring for this spot for quite some time, and
I'm happy we held out for Andrew.
Andrew comes to us from CouchSurfing, where he worked for the past
four years as one of the very early technical staff there, working in
various places throughout the world (Thailand, Alaska, and New York
are the ones I recall). His team scaled their systems from a few web
servers and one monolithic database, to a cluster of over 30 machines
handling almost 100 million page views per month. He was responsible
for introducing Puppet for system configuration at his last job, and
much of his work at CouchSurfing has been in reviewing code and
maintaining a consistent architecture for CouchSurfing.
We're really excited to have Andrew on board to help bring some
systems rigor to our data gathering process. Our current data mining
regime involves a few pieces of lightweight data gathering
infrastructure (e.g. udp2log), a combination of one-off special
purpose log crunching scripts, along with other scripts that started
their lives as one-off special purpose scripts, but have gradually
become core infrastructure. Most of these scripts have single
maintainers, and there is a lot of duplication of effort. In
addition, the systems have a nasty tendency to break at the least
opportune times. Andrew's background bringing sanity to insane
environments will be enormously helpful here.
Andrew has an email address and is technically starting the onboarding
process, but is still wrapping up at CouchSurfing. He'll be with us
part-time starting January 17, and ramping up to full-time starting in
April.
Andrew is based out of Virginia, but is still traveling the world.
Right now, you'll find him in New York City. Please join me in
welcoming Andrew to the team!
Rob