On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 1:50 PM, Terry Chay <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello everyone, > > It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing that Sam Smith[1] has joined > the WIkimedia Foundation as a Software Engineer in Features Engineering. > He'll be working with the Growth team.[2] > > Before joining us, Sam was previously a member of the Last.fm web team > (web-slingers) where he helped to build the new catalogue pages, the > Last.fm Spotify app, the new (*the only*) user on-boarding flow, and > helped immortalise his favorite band (Maybeshewill) in most of their unit > test cases. Before that he worked on everything from Java job schedulers, > to Pascal windows installers, to Microsoft server sysadmining, to Zend > Framework and symfony migrations. Ask him which was the was the worst—my > money is on the PHP migration[3]. He received his Masters Degree in physics > at the University of Warwick. > > Sam is based in London (the capital of England, not the city in Ontario or > the settlement the island of Kiribati). He lives in Surray Quays with his > wife, Lisa, and his 19 month old son, George. His hobbies include juggling > (he's juggled for 6 years), unicycling (one day he's going to attempt the > distance record… one day!), climbing (specifically bouldering, he's > actually really afraid of heights), coffee (it's not really a hobby, it's > an obsession), and playing Lineage 1[4]. Ask him to do some unicycling up a > boulder while drinking coffee and playing Lineage… now *that* would be > juggling! > > His first official day is today, Tuesday, January 21, 2013. (What? On > time? He signed his contract last year, so I had a lot of time to prepare. > Having said that, I didn't start this e-mail until this morning so balance > has been restored to the force.) > > Please join me in a not-belated welcome of Sam Smith to the Wikimedia > Foundation. :-) > \o/ Very very glad to have you aboard Sam. And not just because you're a fellow coffee snob. ;-) Sam is our people. From our very first transatlantic conversation, I got a clear sense that Sam doesn't just like solving engineering problems. He really deeply cares about doing right by users, making sure they have a decent (maybe even a fun and enjoyable!) experience. I'm privileged to have someone of his experience, intelligence, and empathy for users on our team. -- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/ _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
