Hello everyone,
It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing that C. Scott Ananian[1] has joined the
Wikimedia Foundation as a Features Engineer.
Before joining us, Scott was Director of New Technologies at One Laptop per Child where
he, among other things, worked on Nell, a platform to allow unsupervised learning of early
literacy skills on tablets used in places like Ethiopia[2], and the OLPC security
mechanism to prevent kids’ laptops from being stolen in transit. In between stints at
OLPC, he worked as the Senior Architect at litl, LLC[3]. Clearly he has a thing for highly
mobile PCs and applications (don’t tell Tomasz, he already stole Kaldari from Features
:-P).
He started volunteering work on the MediaWiki parser project (Parsoid) on February 12th
and got his first patch merged on February 15th. He’s had over 150 patches merged since
then so it made sense that we should probably hire him ;-)
As you probably guessed with my usual tardiness, his first official day was actually
Monday, July 8. He is going to continue his work on the Parsoid team with Gabriel Wicke
and Subbu Sastry. He is super-motivated and has been mission-aligned since before
Wikipedia existed[4], so I expect you’ll see him range far from our text infrastructure
work. When he was at OLPC he liked to say his job was to “build robust and reliable
systems to allow kids to discover, share, and learn.”
Scott lives and works in Cambridge, MA[5]. He is a square dancer[6] and theatrical
lighting designer. I have it on good word that he’s a demon on MIT Mystery Hunt [7]—not
sure if he’s on the same team as our Board Members or not [8], but if not…
Please join me in welcoming C. Scott to the Wikimedia Foundation. :-)
Take care,
Terry
[1]: [[User:Cananian]]
[2]:
http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian_kids.php
[3]:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litl
[4]:
http://www.salon.com/2000/02/09/linuxdvd/
[5]: tewwy: interested in relocating? :-)
cscott: no, sorry.
cscott: wife, kid, and house like where they are. ;-)
[6]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_square_dance ;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Squares
[7]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Mystery_Hunt
[8]: [[User:Sj]] did, in fact, recruit him to the Codex team in 2009. Codex won in 2011.
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/
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http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tychay
aim: terrychay