[Second one today!]
I am delighted to announce that Moriel Schottlender [0] has converted to full time staff member status as a Software Engineer in Features Engineering, as of 1 October.
Moriel has been working with us, initially as a GSoC 2013 student [1] and then as a student contractor in the Editing Team since last Summer. She has significantly improved editing tools, including providing much of the media editing and language mark-up support in VisualEditor, and creating and improving the GUI editor for TemplateData. As a native Hebrew speaker, her RTL expertise has been invaluable in helping the team find issues and improve experience for our.
Moriel will continue working as part of the Editing Team [2] to help take forward our work of extending the various editing tools to make contributions easy for all our users. She will be moving to San Francisco from New York City where she is currently based.
Some details from Moriel herself:
I am originally from Israel, I've spent the last 9 years living in New York City, earning a bachelors degree in Physics and just now graduated with a Masters in Computer Science. I've worked for airline security and then as the internet applications project manager in the PR office of the Israeli Consulate in New York, both of which are pretty much the polar opposite to openness and open source, so if I suddenly revert to asking people to pack their own bags or to refer to the diplomat for official answers, feel free to slap me back to a better reality.
I was a student for so long that the term "hobbies" is almost foreign. Is that what you do when you don't have homework and exams?
Science - I do love to talk about, discuss, think about and demonstrate Physics and science in general, and I even have a science outreach website with some do-it-yourself science experiment videos and articles. If there's a microwave oven in the office, I can show everyone how to calculate the speed of light with a chocolate bar.
Fiction writing - I love writing (fiction, not school essays) and when I do have some time I work on a science-fiction novella, though with the progress I'm making, it might have to be adjusted to holosuite emitters by the time it is done. (Trekkie reference!)
Soundtrack music - I also love Broadway shows and listening to soundtracks in general. The Editing Team can testify how much I like Frozen and its songs, repeatedly.
Oh, and I'm really excited to move to San Francisco and join everyone at the office!
Please join me in congratulating Moriel.
[0]: [[mw:User:MSchottlender-WMF https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:MSchottlender-WMF]]
[1]: [[mw:Summer of Code 2013 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013]]
[2]: [[mw:Editing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editing]]
Yours,