Hi everyone
It is my pleasure to introduce Nik Everett as a new Senior Software Engineer specializing in Search, working remotely from his home in Raleigh, North Carolina. Nik joins us from Lulu, a company founded by Bob Young[1] to enable anyone to publish a book (dealing with print, distribution, and order fulfillment issues). Nik was responsible for a number of DevOps-related tasks at Lulu, mainly centered around test automation, build infrastructure, and database performance, but also including maintenance and support of their Solr infrastructure. He also founded and chaired Lulu’s architecture review board, which is similar to a group we’re just now starting up here[2]
Prior to Lulu, Nik worked at Bandwidth.com, Radarfind, and Nortel. He has Bachelors Degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Nik knows many programming languages. He prefers writing in Python, but due to the nature of what we’re doing here, he’ll probably end up writing more Java and (of course) PHP. He likes picking up a new languages every so often. He’s currently playing around with Haskell, and on good days may be able to explain what a monad is. :-)
Nik’s nick on Freenode is “manybubbles”, and he's cc'd on this mail.
Rob
[1] One of Bob Young’s other claims to fame is as co-founder and former CEO of Red Hat.
[2] Not yet an “architecture review board”, but that may be as good a name as any for this: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-May/069569.html