Hello everyone,

It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing that Subramanya Sastry is joining the Wikimedia Foundation as a Senior Features Software Engineer. Initially, Subbu (as he is known by his peers) will work with the Visual Editor team to assist on building a new Parser. Maybe later we can get him interested in other architectural and structural performance engineering. ;-)

Before joining us, Subbu worked with fellow WMFer, Fabrice Florin, as the engineering manager and lead engineer at NewsTrust http://newstrust.net/, a nonprofit social news network devoted to good journalism. More recently (and more relevantly), he has been contributing to JRuby http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JRuby to build a next-generation higher performance runtime http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/oss-grant-roundup-jruby-runtime/. He has his Ph.D. in CS from U. Wisconsin-Madison and his Bachelors from IIT in Kanpur.

Beyond that, he enjoys doing a lot of nonprofit and volunteer work. He’s worked at the Environment Support Group in Bangalore http://esgindia.org and with Asha for Education http://ashanet.org/, the Friends of River Narmada <http://narmada.org/ , and the India Institute for Critical Action Centre in Movement http://cacim.net/ which focuses on critical engagement with social movements and their organizational politics. Most recently, he has been volunteering his time with Center for Earth and Energy Democracy http://ceed.org.

Subbu comes highly recommended by his peers, who describe him as an outstanding and versatile engineer, as well as a wonderful team player. More importantly, he is deeply committed to social change — not just to technology for its own sake.

He enjoys growing vegetables, cooking food, live music, movies on big screens, books, armchair philosophising and badminton.

His first official day was May 14th (I rushed the paperwork so Gabriel could get his hands on him :-)), and he will be working remotely from Minneapolis, MN. (He's reading this mailing list as we speak so I haven't had time to scrub all the awful things we said about him. Sorry!)

Please join me in welcoming Subbu to the Wikimedia Foundation. :-)

Take care,

Terry

terry chay 최태리 Director of Features Engineering Wikimedia Foundation “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.”

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