Hello everyone,
It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing that Luke Welling has joined the Wikimedia Foundation as a Senior Features Engineer.
Just before joining us, Luke was the Engineering Manager and second hire at PandaWhale, where he took the site from napkin to shipping, including building the testing infrastructure, message queue, karma system, and e-mail notification structure. There are so many other things that he’s been involved with in his 15 year career as a professional web engineer, that I won’t bore you with the details, but here is a short list: Message Systems, OmniTI, Hitwise, MySQL AB, and TangledWeb. Instead, I’d like to mention that when I attended my first PHP conference in 2003, Luke was already an elder-statesman there.
He’s probably most famous for writing **the** book on PHP—well if not “the” book, at least the best-selling PHP book of all time[1]. But since he also had a stint at MySQL, he also wrote their top-selling MySQL title[2]: And I’ve never known a fiercer advocate of the the budding[3] PHP developer[4] than him.
His first official day was on October 3rd but I flaked out, and HR stole my thunder[5]. He’ll be working with the Editor Engagement and Performance teams on the database scaling and queuing that will form the backbone of of notifications and messaging, as well as filling in with the Editor Engagement Experimentation team, and assorted tool building.
Luke lives in Maryland with Laura, his wife (and co-author), daughter, and horses. We’ll be trading days in the Bay Area with Mozilla, where Laura[6] is their Webtools engineering manager — someone has to take be in Maryland to care of the kid and horses (and bayonets).
Since I was so late at writing this, I want to leave you with a little tidbit about what it’s like to work with Luke: He once got Slashdotted, in the post-Slashdot reality[7], and he’s such a great person to work with that his workers created his own fake twitter account based on things he said in the office.[8]
Please join me in a very belated welcome of Luke Welling to the Wikimedia Foundation. :-)
Take care, Terry
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Web-Development-Edition/dp/0672329166%3E [2]: http://www.amazon.com/MySQL-Tutorial-Luke-Welling/dp/0672325845 [3]: http://lukewelling.com/2007/03/13/i-%E2%99%A5-register_globals/ [4]: http://lukewelling.com/2008/02/04/you-used-php-to-write-that-uh-yeah/ [5]: http://identi.ca/notice/97127233 [6]: http://www.laurathomson.com/ [7]: http://lukewelling.com/2006/08/03/java-programmers-are-the-erotic-furries-of... Image is here: http://wiki.huihoo.com/images/9/9b/Programmer-hierarchy.gif [8]: http://twitter.com/lukeism/ and thus http://phpdoc.info/lukeism/ a la http://phpdoc.info/chayism/
terry chay 최태리 Director of Features Engineering Wikimedia Foundation “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.”
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