Hi everyone,

I'm pleased to welcome Eric Evans as a new engineer in our Services team. Eric lives and works in San Antonio, TX

Eric's formative years in his current career were at Rackspace, which at the time he joined (February 2000) was a small 30 person hosting company in southern Texas. At the beginning of his tenure, he was responsible for customer-facing sysadmin work. As he progressed with increasing responsibilities, he eventually led a small team in the architecture and implementation of a multi-petabyte storage system that would become Rackspace's Cloud Files offering. By the time he left Rackspace, he was a core contributor on the Cassandra storage software project, contributing CQL (Cassandra Query Language) among other things. He also is given credit/blame for having coined the term "NoSQL".

Eric left Rackspace in 2011, and has since worked in a couple of Cassandra-related roles, first at a London-based startup (Acunu) where he honed his remote collaboration skills, and later at The OpenNMS Group, where he developed Newts, a Cassandra-backed time series data store used as part of the larger network management stack.

Eric has deep roots in the free software world, and contributes even when not strictly necessary for his job. He is a longtime contributor to the Debian Project, where he met our very own Faidon Liambotis, and hence, a big reason why he's here. He also created Lumens, which is software for controlling Chrismas light displays.

Eric's first job here is to help get RESTbase ready for production use. RESTbase is a Cassandra-backed (see a theme yet?) revision caching/storage architecture which we're initially using to accelerate VisualEditor load times. Everyone involved is really excited to get someone with Eric's depth of experience in this area, and looking forward to seeing big things here.

Eric starts working remotely today, and can be found on the #wikimedia-services IRC channel, using the nick "urandom". He'll also be visiting our SF office the week of March 9-13.

Rob