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