I am delighted to announce that October 8th will be Andre Klapper's first day as Wikimedia Foundation's Bug Wrangler. [0]
You've seen him on IRC as "andre__" and on mediawiki.org as Malyacko, and sadly that's mostly how I'll be seeing him since he lives in the Czech Republic. He speaks German, English, French, and Czech, and can kinda read Russian. You might have met him at the 2012 Berlin hackathon.
Andre got into open source because he switched to Linux, had a support question about GNOME Evolution, and got sucked into bug triage from there. You can read more about that in his essay "Kick, Push" in Open Advice <open-advice.org>. He's an editor of German- and English-language Wikimedia projects, and has already started commenting on and nudging bugs in our Bugzilla.
I know Andre through the GNOME community, where he is Bugzilla maintainer and bugsquad member, member of the Release Team, member of the Translation Project Coordination team, member of the Czech GNOME translation teams, and author & maintainer of the GNOME Evolution user documentation. And he organized and ran GNOME's part in Google Code-In 2010/11 and 2011/12, so he might have opinions on whether Wikimedia should participate this year.
Remember Maemo? [1] Andre worked as bugmaster on Maemo and MeeGo as well.
I am thoroughly pleased that we were able to snag Andre for ourselves, and think his abilities and experience make him a great addition to WMF's Engineering Community Team and to Wikimedia. Welcome!
[0] In case you're new and wondering what a bug wrangler does: http://tieguy.org/talks-files/LCA-2005-paper-html/index.html . In case you're an old-timer: this is the same job Mark Hershberger did as "Bugmeister" and I changed the title to something less gendered.
[1] Last year at the GSoC mentor summit, Andre and I were sitting next to each other in a session, both got out our N900s to take notes, and started laughing. It's like the Newton of our time.