All,

Please join me in welcoming Ben and Daniel to Wikimedia Foundation.

Both Ben and Daniel are joining the Technical Operations team to help us to build, improve, scale and support our web systems and infrastructure.

Ben, who is based in SF office, comes with a broad set of expertise and experiences in Systems Engineering and Operations, in particular, scaling the systems and creating tools to manage large number of servers. While his initial focus is on database and analytics systems, he will also be working on our new distributed (with redundancy and scalable) file system and getting the infrastructure in the new datacenter into full production.

He comes to WMF from Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, where he was first a member, then a manager of the Systems Engineering team. The group was responsible for maintaining the thousands of servers that power the Second Life grid as well as the development, QA, and staging environments. In addition to maintaining the grid, the SE team at Linden was instrumental in helping the engineering group design systems and services in a way that would scale easily and fail safely, increasing reliability and uptime for the service as a whole. He is eager to learn new approaches to managing large numbers of servers with few people effectively, and would be happy to talk about how things work at Linden Lab for comparison. Prior to Linden, Ben helped grow Simply Hired from a 5-computer stealth startup to a 600-server company with millions of page views per month.

Ben also enjoys adventure wherever he can find it, whether local or foreign. Travel, photography, cooking, backpacking, etc all keep swallowing up whatever time is left over. He was married last October and loves having a fish monger, baker, butcher, and vegetable market all within walking distance in the North Berkeley neighborhood where he lives.

Daniel will initially be working out of from Cologne, Germany and he will be commuting to Amsterdam sporadically to work on our data center there. Previously, he has worked as a system administrator for OnVista Media, Ligatus, and Host Europe, managing and supports hundreds of servers.

Daniel is also an active Wikipedian. He made his first edit on en.wp in Apr 2002, but spends most of his time on en.wikt. where he has been an administrator since 2008 and focuses on adding German words and categorization. He also maintains a statistics site about Mediawikis at http://s23.org/wikistats/. His global account name and IRC handle is "mutante" (cloak wiktionary/Mutante) while his WMF username is "dzahn".

Daniel has a daughter living here in the Bay Area and has taken her to visit our office last year. Besides speaking his native German tongue, he speaks English, French and a little "ksh" (Kölsch / Ripuarian).

Thanks,

CT