Greetings all,
I'm pleased to announce that the mobile department has two new staff
members. Yuri Astrakhan & Adam Baso join as sr. software developers on
the mobile partner team. In this role Yuri and Adam will support
projects like Wikipedia Zero, SMS/USSD, and J2ME to further the reach
of our projects in geographic areas that have both financial and
technical impediments to access Wikipedia. They will be working
closely with Kul and Dan from the global development group.
Yuri has been heavily involved in Wikipedia-related projects 2005-2007
developing the API framework and querying subsystem, contributing to
pywikibot code, and making millions of changes as yurikbot, while at
the same time working as a software consultant for several large
banks. In 2008 Yuri joined a small hedge-fund to lead the development
of an automated trading platform. While there, Yuri continued various
open source projects such as time-series database (timeseriesdb).
After over five years, Yuri has rejoined the MediaWiki community and
will be working for us from New York.
Adam spent the past seven years working in the field of information
security, specializing in application security, identity management,
and encryption in the retail, government, and banking sectors. Adam
led the OWASP Minneapolis-Saint Paul chapter for a couple of years,
and proudly organized the OWASP AppSec USA 2011 conference. Adam and
his wife are relocating to San Francisco from Minneapolis-Saint Paul,
and they look forward to the opportunity to live in such a thriving
software-friendly community.
The mobile group is excited and proud to welcome both Yuri & Adam as
sr. engineers to the partner team.
This completes the team and allows them to work aggressively to reach
our 4 billion page target through outreach projects like Wikipedia
Zero.
Please join me in welcoming Yuri and Adam to the Wikimedia Foundation!
--tomasz