Hello all,

I’m delighted to announce that Ken Snider is joining the Wikimedia operations team. He will start as an international contractor working remotely from Toronto, Canada on June 10, and will be visiting SF in the week of June 17. We’re currently in the process of seeking work authorization in the United States in the Director of TechOps position.

CT has graciously agreed to support the ops leadership transition full-time through June, and part-time through July. We’ll be starting the handover while Ken is working remotely.

A bit more about Ken: Ken was apparently genetically predisposed to become a sysadmin since he joined one of Canada’s first large ISPs, Primus, straight out of school in 1997 and helped build their infrastructure til 2001. He then joined a startup called OpenCOLA in 2001 which was co-founded by Cory Doctorow and developed early P2P precursors to tools like BitTorrent and Steam. It’s best known today for the development of an open source (GPL’d) cola recipe which is still in use (more than 150,000 cans sold if Wikipedia is to be believed).

Ken got involved in one of Cory’s pet projects, BoingBoing.net which some of you may have heard of ;-), and has been their sysadmin since 2003. After a stint from 2001-2005 at DataWire, Ken became Director of Tech Ops at Federated Media, a role he held from 2005-2012.

Federated Media is an ad network that was founded to support high traffic blogs and sites that want to stay independent of large publishers, with a network that supports more than 1B requests/day.

One of the unusual challenges at FM was that the company grew through acquisitions of various blogging and publishing networks. This led to the challenge of integrating very heterogeneous operations and engineering infrastructure, including multiple geographically distributed ops teams and data-center locations. As DTO, Ken led these efforts, such as OS standardization, development of a unified deployment infrastructure, etc. Ken also ensured that the operations group partnered effectively with the various engineering teams developing site features and enhancements.

I want to again take this opportunity to thank CT Woo for his tireless operations leadership since December 2010. I’d also like to thank everyone who’s participated in the Director of TechOps search process.

Please join me in welcoming Ken to the Wikimedia Foundation and the community. :-)

All best,

Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation