Hi everyone,

I'd like to welcome Dan Duvall to Wikimedia Foundation in his role as Automation Engineer in our Release and QA group. Dan comes to us most recently from Giant Rabbit, where he worked for a few months doing web development consulting, and before that, at National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), where he lead their engineering work. One big accomplishment from his tenure at NaNoWriMo was porting their website code from Drupal to Ruby on Rails.

Dan will be working closely with Chris McMahon and Željko Filipin on improving our browser test automation. Our browser test work is largely written in Ruby, and of course, large portions of MediaWiki are written in PHP. Thus, Dan's deep experience both with Ruby and PHP will be incredibly helpful in this role. We also anticipate his Ruby knowledge will come in quite handy in other pockets of our system that rely on Ruby skills (e.g. our Vagrant-based developer test environment system)

Dan tells me this is by far the biggest place he's ever worked, so please bear with him as he learns to navigate our expansive office campus and figures out the intricacies of our intraoffice shuttle system :-)

Welcome Dan!

Rob