Hi all,
I'm very pleased to announce that as of this week, Yuvi Panda is part of the Wikimedia Technical Operations team, to work on our Wikimedia Labs infrastructure. Yuvi originally joined the Wikimedia Foundation Mobile team in December 2011, where he has been lead development for the original Wikipedia App and its rewrite, amongst many other projects.
Besides his work in Mobile, Yuvi has been volunteering for Ops work in Wikimedia Labs for a long time now. One of the notable examples of his work is a seamlessly integrated Web proxy system that allows public web requests from the Internet to be proxied to Labs instances on private IPs without requiring public IP addresses for each instance. This very user friendly system, which he built on top of NGINX, LUA, redis, sqlite and the OpenStack API, sees a lot of usage and has dramatically reduced the need for Labs users to request (scarce) public IP address resources via a manual approval process.
Another example of his work that has made a big difference is the initiation of the Labs-Vagrant project; bringing the virtues of the Mediawiki:Vagrant project to Wikimedia Labs, and allowing anyone to bring a MediaWiki development environment up in Labs with great ease. More recently Yuvi has been working on our much needed infrastructure in Labs for monitoring metrics (Graphite) and service availability (Shinken). We expect this will give us a lot more insight into the internals and availability of software and services running in Wikimedia Labs and its many projects, and we should be able to deploy it in Production as well.
Of course all of this work didn't go unnoticed, and about half a year ago we've asked Yuvi if he was interested to move to Ops. With his extensive development experience and his demonstrated ability to join this with solid Ops work to create stable and highly useful solutions, we think he's a great fit for this role.
Yuvi recently had his VISA application accepted, and is planning to move to San Francisco in March 2015. Until then he will be working with us remotely from India.
Please join me in congratulating Yuvi!