Hi everyone,
I'm pleased to introduce Gilles Dubuc, who is a newly-arrived Senior
Software Engineer and serving as Tech Lead for the Multimedia team
here at WMF. We searched far and wide to find him, and we're thrilled
to finally have him to filling this role.
One of the biggest responsibilities of the Multimedia team is image
handling on Commons and the other sites, and Gilles has a great
background for this. His previous role was with deviantART, where he
was for 4 1/2 years, leading teams responsible for building and
maintaining components in dA's image uploading and handling
infrastructure.
Gilles earned his BA Information Technology Université de la
Méditerranée Aix-Marseille II and a degree in Multimedia
Systems/Computer Science from Napier University (the latter having a
heavy emphasis on visual design and video production.
In case you're wondering how he pronounces his first name, Gilles
kindly updated Wiktionary for us, now complete with an audio file:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gilles :-) As for his last name, the
IPA for it is /dybyk/ which would sound like "dewbook" (roughly). No
particular emphasis on either syllable.
Gilles will be working remotely from his home in Montpellier, France,
though he'll be visiting the office the week of the Architecture
Summit (January 21-24). I have to confess that I don't yet know Gilles
well enough to know which celebrity image I can misappropriate as his
photograph, and haven't yet captured a screencap an awkward moment in
Hangouts to post on the staff page, but it's on my to-do list.
Gilles is using "gi11es" (numbers instead of letters for the lowercase
"L"s) on IRC, and is gilles(a)wikimedia.org
Welcome Gilles!
Rob
Suggested photo to attach with email: http://www.hotflick.net/flicks/2010_Scott_Pilgrim_vs_the_World/010SVW_Jason…
Hello everyone,
It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing that Shahyar G(whatever)[1] has joined the Wikimedia Foundation as Software Engineer in Features Engineering.
Before joining us, Shahyar worked as an engineer at DeviantART[2] developing both front-end and back-end software, with a focus on analytics. He was also the lead API engineer at ViaFoura and web developer for a company that works on what the Internet is really for[3]. He’s a long-time Wikipedian (he collaborated on two Good Articles[4]) and will be invaluable in his new role working with the Core Features Team, ensuring that Flow is full of parallax scrolling unicorns.
Shahyar lives in Montreal and claims to have come to Canada for the poutine and never left, which pretty much summarizes his life. He is trilingual in English, French, and Persian. When he’s not writing JS, he’s drinking whisky to cope with the fact that he’s not writing JS (preferably Yamazaki 12 year), travelling, and practicing his beatific expression for avatar photos.
His first day is today! [5] He’ll be working remotely but will be visiting the office during the architecture summit, so keep an eye on your fries!
Please join me in welcoming Shahyar to the Wikimedia Foundation!
[1] [[User:SG]]
[2] http://shahyarg.deviantart.com/
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKNnwLL991c
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reza_Shah
[5] I know what you're thinking, but the answer is most of this got written by the Core Features team so my record of tardy announcement e-mails remains unblemished.
And because Jared keeps demanding I include a photo of our new hires:
(Trust me, this is reference photo.)
terry chay 최태리
Director of Features Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation
“Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.”
p: +1 (415) 839-6885 x6832
m: +1 (408) 480-8902
e: tchay(a)wikimedia.org
i: http://terrychay.com/
w: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tychay
aim: terrychay
I've been a Wikipedia trainer at schools for quite some time now.
Probably the single most common mistake people in my workshops make when
accessing a Wiki's meta pages (i.e. "Wikipedia:Help") is by omitting the
colon indicating the namespace.
The default search namespace is just NS-0, i.e. the main namespace. This
means if you enter "Wikisource Help" on en.wikisource.org, you get
nothing useful:
http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?search=Wikisource+Help&button=&title=S…
English Wikipedia has implemented a workaround by creating redirects
from the main namespace to the project namespace: an ugly fix, since it
mixes up the distinction between namespaces.
Instead, we should make MediaWiki a bit smarter with regard to the
namespace selection: When you search for "Help Editing", the Help
namespace should be included.
This could be done in the most simplest form by checking whether a
namespace string is a prefix of the search string (perhaps excluding
exotic namespaces such as MediaWiki) or even if the namespace name is
contained in the search string.
What do you think?
Best regards,
Tobias
Hi! As of yesterday, I'm back after my three-month sabbatical at Hacker
School. I'm in catchup mode so I haven't yet resubscribed to most lists,
nor quite taken back over Engineering Community Team (Quim Gil is still in
charge until sometime next week when I feel back up to speed).
Thank you to WMF for the sabbatical program, thanks to my boss Rob Lanphier
for his support, and thanks to my team. I was able to walk away worry-free
for three great months because I knew that Andre Klapper, Quim Gil, and
Guillaume Paumier had my back. :)
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
Welcome, Shahyar. Thank you for joining us!
Can you point to a pronunciation of your name? (I'm guessing
"shaa-h-yayer")?
I look forward to your work on Flow; it's a super important project. Thanks!
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi,
How can I find which commits entered a certain MediaWiki "build"
(especially the -wmfX ones). Are there any tags in the repository or
is there a page that holds that information?
Thanks,
Strainu
Hi,
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/102617/ fixes a packaging bug
that screws up Puppet installs of libvips-dev on Tools.
It is trivial, but given that a) libvips is used on the im-
age scalers and b) the repository might not be on everyone's
radar, I'd appreciate reviews there.
Thanks,
Tim
[x-posted]
Hello,
The Wikimedia Language Engineering team [1] invites everyone to join the
team’s monthly IRC office hour on January 8, 2014 (Wednesday) at 1700 UTC/
0900 PST on #wikimedia-office. During this session we would be talking
about highlights from our team’s activities and updates from ongoing
projects. Event details and agenda are listed below.
Questions can be sent to me directly before the event. See you all at the
IRC office hour!
regards
Runa
[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Language_Engineering_team
== Details: ==
# Event: WMF Language Engineering Office Hour
# Date and Time: Wednesday, January 8, 2014, 1700-1800 UTC, 0900-1000 PST
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20140108T1700
# IRC channel: #wikimedia-office on irc.freenode.net
== Agenda: ==
Project Updates
Q/A (questions can be sent to runa at wikimedia dot org before the event)
--
Language Engineering - Outreach and QA Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
