I'm pleased to announce that Faidon Liambotis has been promoted to Principal Operations Engineer.
From the very first week he was hired, Faidon has expressed great interest in understanding and improving the complete infrastructure stack of the Wikimedia Foundation, covering not only the domain of the Operations team, but far beyond. I distinctly remember how, a few days after he was hired (which at the time, I didn't take any part in), he approached me for the first time on IRC and said:
"Hi Mark! Nice to meet you. I see you just wrote this nice new director for consistent URL hashing to backends in Varnish. Let me help you get that upstreamed!"
I believe in that same week he fixed some bugs in our nginx setup and solved our scalability issues with Puppet's external (Nagios) resources, amongst other things.
Ever since, Faidon has taken on many projects, large and small, and completed them in ways going far beyond his duties. He has spent enormous amounts of time reviewing other people's patch sets, discussing their ideas, and mentoring them in their work. He's instrumental in coordinating efforts across multiple groups and making sure everyone arrives at the best possible solution. In discussions he's noticed for being analytical and methodical, and calmly working towards a common goal. This is reflected in his architecting work too, where he contributes with sensible ideas and a great knowledge of the open source software and solutions landscape.
Outside of Wikimedia, Faidon has been active in Debian and other open source projects since 2004. He cares deeply about our use of open source solutions and helping our software extensions get upstreamed and made available to others.
I think it's only appropriate that we recognize his role with this promotion.
The biggest problem we may have with him is that he works too much and is involved with almost everything. Fortunately that is a good fit for his new role. :)
Please join me in congratulating Faidon.
—
Mark Bergsma <mark(a)wikimedia.org>
Lead Operations Architect
Acting Director of Technical Operations
Wikimedia Foundation