Hi everyone, We have two new people starting this week in Platform Engineering. James Douglas James started yesterday as the second member of our newly formed Services group. "Services" in this context are standalone software components that often run on their own machines and have very specific jobs, such as "generate a PDF from this article". Much of our infrastructure isn't that specific, so you'll hear us talking a lot over the next year about moving toward "Service Oriented Architecture", which basically means taking our general purpose software and breaking it up into more focused components. James working closely with Gabriel Wicke on bringing new services online, such as RESTbase[1]. James comes to us from Versal, an organization he co-founded, and where he was responsible for building out a Scala-based online education platform. He lives here in San Francisco, and he'll be sitting beside Gabriel on the south end of 3. You can find a wealth of writings about his work with Scala as well as other software development topics on James' personal website[2]. Stas Malyshev Stas joins us from SugarCRM, where he was Software Architect since 2010. Prior to working at Sugar, Stas worked at Zend (makers of PHP), where he was employee #1, and build the first version of their website. In debugging problems on the website, he eventually got slurped into fixing bugs and eventually doing much more with the PHP runtime itself. If you're a php developer (or maybe even if you're not), you should be following Stas's blog[3] where he talks about many issues in PHP development. Stas will be working in the MediaWiki Core team, mostly focused on performance issues (though right now is getting up to speed on the Wikidata Query Service[4], figuring out what we need to do to make it suitable for widespread deployment of WikiGrok[5]). Stas lives in San Jose, and will be working mostly remotely, but will be coming up to the office about once a week. When he's here (like today) he'll be on 3rd floor south. Welcome James and Stas! Rob 1. https://github.com/gwicke/restbase 2. http://earldouglas.com/ 3. http://php100.wordpress.com/ 4. https://wdq.wmflabs.org/ 5. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MobileFrontend/WikiGrok