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