Hi All,

Please join me in welcoming Amir Aharoni as a Software Developer in WMF’s Features Engineering team. Amir will be joining Niklas Laxstrom, Santhosh Thottingal, Siebrand Mazeland and Gerard Meijssen on the Internationalization / Localization features team to add RTL expertise to build and improve language support tools and technologies for reading and editing Wikipedia in all supported languages.

Amir was born in Moscow in 1980 and immigrated to Israel in 1991. He speaks fluent Russian, Hebrew and English, as well as nearly fluent Catalan and he can also read a few other languages, including Latin, Lithuanian, Amharic and Malayalam. He's quite happy and proud about all his different cultural backgrounds and identities and finds them quite useful, too. He dreamt about being a linguist, an encyclopedia and dictionary writer and a programmer since he was five years old. Really. So, this opportunity makes his earliest childhood dreams come true at one fell swoop.

Amir has two bookcases full of dictionaries and grammar books of various languages and he keeps buying at least one dictionary of the local language of every country he visits, as well as a couple of fiction books to use the dictionaries with. He also still loves buying CDs and vinyl records and has very little patience for e-book readers and digital music players, especially if they have DRM features or don't support all Unicode scripts. You will rarely catch him not listening to music; he also plays the piano and can strum a couple of guitar chords. Amir lived for several years in Haifa, the host of Wikimania 2011, and now he lives in a village near Jerusalem. He regularly blogs in Hebrew, English and Russian.

Amir is passionate about Free Software since he first heard about it in a lecture in 1998. He has edited Wikipedia in several languages since 2004, but the project about which he is most proud is editing the heavily cross-referenced version of Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar at the English Wikisource. He reported many MediaWiki bugs and sent a few patches. He's a member of the Wikimedia Language committee and a board member of Wikimedia Israel. He has zero patience for incorrectly displayed right-to-left strings in any software, but you probably knew that about him already (if you've met him in person).

Say hello to Amir online. He’s usually available on our favorite irc channels including #mediawiki

Welcome Amir!