Hi everyone,
I'm pleased to announce Andrew Otto will be coming to Wikimedia Foundation as a software developer in Platform Engineering, focused on analytics. We've been hiring for this spot for quite some time, and I'm happy we held out for Andrew.
Andrew comes to us from CouchSurfing, where he worked for the past four years as one of the very early technical staff there, working in various places throughout the world (Thailand, Alaska, and New York are the ones I recall). His team scaled their systems from a few web servers and one monolithic database, to a cluster of over 30 machines handling almost 100 million page views per month. He was responsible for introducing Puppet for system configuration at his last job, and much of his work at CouchSurfing has been in reviewing code and maintaining a consistent architecture for CouchSurfing.
We're really excited to have Andrew on board to help bring some systems rigor to our data gathering process. Our current data mining regime involves a few pieces of lightweight data gathering infrastructure (e.g. udp2log), a combination of one-off special purpose log crunching scripts, along with other scripts that started their lives as one-off special purpose scripts, but have gradually become core infrastructure. Most of these scripts have single maintainers, and there is a lot of duplication of effort. In addition, the systems have a nasty tendency to break at the least opportune times. Andrew's background bringing sanity to insane environments will be enormously helpful here.
Andrew has an email address and is technically starting the onboarding process, but is still wrapping up at CouchSurfing. He'll be with us part-time starting January 17, and ramping up to full-time starting in April.
Andrew is based out of Virginia, but is still traveling the world. Right now, you'll find him in New York City. Please join me in welcoming Andrew to the team!
Rob