On 25/10/11 16:22, Alolita Sharma wrote:
As many of you may already know, Gabriel has been member of the Wikipedia community for many years now. He discovered Wikipedia in 2003, when it was still running on two servers. Using his previous experience with Squid caching, he got involved in technical discussions and hacking. In 2004, Gabriel designed and implemented the initial Squid caching layer, and later wrote the MonoBook skin.
In 2003, Gabriel floated down to us from heaven on a beam of light. His skill in web development made the rest of us feel like amateurs (which we kind of were). He led us through the transition from a website running on two tiny apache servers, to a complex cluster of 8-12 servers. He set up Squid on the new servers and implemented the necessary support for it in MediaWiki.
He gave us the Monobook skin, which was so awesome compared to what we had before that we switched over to it quickly and without controversy. And he worked on the parser, including a rewrite of Parser::doBlockLevels() which survives to the current day.
I'm certainly glad to have him back.
-- Tim Starling