Hello everyone, It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing that Sam Smith[1] has joined the WIkimedia Foundation as a Software Engineer in Features Engineering. He'll be working with the Growth team.[2] Before joining us, Sam was previously a member of the Last.fm web team (web-slingers) where he helped to build the new catalogue pages, the Last.fm Spotify app, the new (the only) user on-boarding flow, and helped immortalise his favorite band (Maybeshewill) in most of their unit test cases. Before that he worked on everything from Java job schedulers, to Pascal windows installers, to Microsoft server sysadmining, to Zend Framework and symfony migrations. Ask him which was the was the worst—my money is on the PHP migration[3]. He received his Masters Degree in physics at the University of Warwick. Sam is based in London (the capital of England, not the city in Ontario or the settlement the island of Kiribati). He lives in Surray Quays with his wife, Lisa, and his 19 month old son, George. His hobbies include juggling (he's juggled for 6 years), unicycling (one day he's going to attempt the distance record… one day!), climbing (specifically bouldering, he's actually really afraid of heights), coffee (it's not really a hobby, it's an obsession), and playing Lineage 1[4]. Ask him to do some unicycling up a boulder while drinking coffee and playing Lineage… now that would be juggling! His first official day is today, Tuesday, January 21, 2013. (What? On time? He signed his contract last year, so I had a lot of time to prepare. Having said that, I didn't start this e-mail until this morning so balance has been restored to the force.) Please join me in a not-belated welcome of Sam Smith to the Wikimedia Foundation. :-) Take care, terry P.S. Because Jared is demanding we include a picture for new staff and contractors, here is one[5]: [1] https://github.com/phuedx [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth [3] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity.html [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lineage_(video_game) [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heston_Blumenthal https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heston_Blumenthal_Chef_Whites.jpg 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/ w: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tychay aim: terrychay