On 12/19/2011 03:28 AM, Tomasz Finc wrote:
Greetings all,
The Mobile and Special Projects department is pleased to announce the addition of two new contractors to the team: Yuvaraj Pandian and Max Seminik.
Yuvaraj Pandian or Yuvi as we gotten to know him was one of our 2011 Google Summer of Code students. During GSoC he worked with Arthur Richards on porting the Wikipedia 1.0 bot to a PHP extension named Selection Sifter. This was in important offline project as it allowed us to better support and extend our offline tool chains. Previous to this he had been active in the busroutes.in community where users @logic and @planemad motivated him to come on and help the Wikimedia community. One of his early Wikimedia project memories includes the tawiki community discussing the ShortUrl extension. He found the entire channel so lively and helpful that he applied for GSoC.
Yuvi will be working for us remotely while on a six month sabbatical from KCG College of Technology, India. He'll be extending the Android app, enhancing MobileFrontend, and working with our various offline efforts to further the reach of the projects. You can find him on irc under the nick 'yuviapanda' .
Max Semink has been an active MediaWiki contributor since 2009. He's recently been most involved in developing the API Sandbox for MediaWiki. An extension that allows any user to easily create complex API queries through a visual interface. When not hacking on MediaWiki, Max has been busy developing C++ software for embedded systems in the railroad industry. While train switching has captured the majority of his recent developer cycles, he's super eager to change direction and focus his full time efforts on MediaWiki.
Max will be continuing his interest in the API by helping us improve and extend its use within mobile. He'll be adding a proper API to MobileFrontend, extending support for GPS, and in general moving the API forward for our mobile clients. Max will be working for us remotely and can be found under the nick 'MaxSem' .
It's great to be able to see two active community members be able to join us full time.
Please join me in (re)-welcoming Yuvi and Max!
--tomasz
It was great getting to work with Yuvi and Max this past summer (during GSoC) and getting to meet them at Wikimedia events this fall, and I'm glad that Wikimedia will get to benefit even more from their expertise, attitudes and perspectives. Yay!