Hi everyone,
I'm pleased to introduce Gilles Dubuc, who is a newly-arrived Senior Software Engineer and serving as Tech Lead for the Multimedia team here at WMF. We searched far and wide to find him, and we're thrilled to finally have him to filling this role.
One of the biggest responsibilities of the Multimedia team is image handling on Commons and the other sites, and Gilles has a great background for this. His previous role was with deviantART, where he was for 4 1/2 years, leading teams responsible for building and maintaining components in dA's image uploading and handling infrastructure.
Gilles earned his BA Information Technology Université de la Méditerranée Aix-Marseille II and a degree in Multimedia Systems/Computer Science from Napier University (the latter having a heavy emphasis on visual design and video production.
In case you're wondering how he pronounces his first name, Gilles kindly updated Wiktionary for us, now complete with an audio file: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gilles :-) As for his last name, the IPA for it is /dybyk/ which would sound like "dewbook" (roughly). No particular emphasis on either syllable.
Gilles will be working remotely from his home in Montpellier, France, though he'll be visiting the office the week of the Architecture Summit (January 21-24). I have to confess that I don't yet know Gilles well enough to know which celebrity image I can misappropriate as his photograph, and haven't yet captured a screencap an awkward moment in Hangouts to post on the staff page, but it's on my to-do list.
Gilles is using "gi11es" (numbers instead of letters for the lowercase "L"s) on IRC, and is gilles@wikimedia.org
Welcome Gilles!
Rob