Hi everyone,

I'm pleased to announce Mukunda Modell, a new member of our Release and QA group[1] in Platform Engineering. He'll be working on the multitude of things that need to be done to make the process of getting code from the first developer submission out into production in a reliable and timely way that doesn't compromise the quality of the site. He has the title "Release Engineer", which is something you shouldn't read too literally if you're familiar with these things. More on this in a bit.

Mukunda lives and works in Springfield, Missouri (not far at all from Zack Exley, i.e. far away from any direct flight to SF). He most recently worked in the past few months as an independent consultant specializing in deployment issues. Prior to that worked for deviantArt (remotely) for several years, and came highly recommended by his colleagues that worked with him there (Gilles specifically prodded Mukunda to apply). Mukunda started off as a PHP developer there, and then gradually moved into more operations and release focused activities. Prior to that he's worked on network-attached storage (Niveus Media) and on the back-end for web games (D.Lux Games)

I'm going to borrow a quote from Ori's interview feedback on Mukunda as to one big reason we hired him. Ori wrote “what impressed me the most was the palpable gratification he seems to derive from improving developers' workflows. It motivates him to scrutinize tools and configurations and to look for ways in which they fit poorly with developer requirements. Which is exactly what we need for this role.” Indeed. One big thing that Mukunda did at deviantArt was to champion the choice of Phabricator for their organization, and he was responsible for the subsequent migration to and maintenance of their installation. His timing coming into this organization is impeccable[2]

We chose the title "Release Engineer" because it's a reasonably standard term in the industry for the skills and responsibilities that we have. In Wikimedia world, we call what Mukunda is doing "deployment", and really, it's going to be everything from improving the Beta Cluster, to improving our Vagrant setup, to improving scap, to setting up Phabricator. If you look at work that Bryan Davis and Antoine Musso have been doing recently, you won't be too far away from the work that Mukunda will be tackling.

Please join me in welcoming Mukunda to the Wikimedia Foundation!

Rob

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_and_QA_Team [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Phabricator