Congratulations, Aaron! Dan
On 7 April 2014 17:40, Rob Lanphier <ro...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Hi everyone > > I'm pleased to announce that Aaron Schulz is taking on a new role in > Wikimedia Foundation's Platform Team: Senior Performance Engineer. > > Aaron works on MediaWiki internals -- components that every > user-visible feature depends on, but which are rarely user-visible > themselves. The impact of Aaron's work on the reliability and > performance of MediaWiki is felt by many, but fully known to few, so > I'd like to use this occasion to highlight some of this work. > > Aaron is the primary author of MediaWiki's file handling backend, job > queue, its integration with Redis key-value database and the > OpenStack's Swift distributed filesystem -- just to name a few of the > more significant (and relatively recent) components. In addition to > these things, Aaron has designed a heavily-used set of generic > mechanisms for enabling concurrent access to shared resources, for > breaking up big computations into smaller units of work, and for > distributing those units of work across a cluster of machines that can > execute it. Aaron's code plays an important supporting role in most > (if not all) significant MediaWiki functionality. > > Aaron's move to performance recognizes the critical role he has > already played in this area, and reflects our evolving understanding > of how important that work is. We are constantly striving to make the > experience of using MediaWiki snappy so that editors can do their work > without waiting on the software to acknowledge their actions. To meet > these standards, we need to tackle performance in (at least) two > areas: > > 1. Using data to provide a picture of how users experience the site, > identifying where users encounter latency, quantifying how it impacts > their engagement, and using this information to drive optimizations to > the code, paying particular attention to client-side network and > computational load. In making this a focal point, we are heeding Steve > Souders' Performance Golden Rule: "80-90% of the end-user response > time is spent on the frontend. Start there." [1] Our goal here is to > ensure that the visual display of information and the reactivity of > the user interface exhibit the kind of immediacy that is needed for > users to focus on and engage with content. > > 2. Building a well-integrated set of services that, when used in the > most obvious way, allows it to do as many things as possible, as fast > as possible, while remaining resilient to changes in site activity. > The vast majority of visits to our site never reach the backend of our > stack, but the minority that do involve really critical site > functions, such as all editor activity. We want the MediaWiki > ecosystem to have not only the capacity to sustain current levels of > activity, but to be an enabler of growth by making it possible for > many more people to contribute in new ways. To meet this challenge, we > need MediaWiki to be increasingly parallel, and to provide efficient, > concurrent access to a rich variety of content types and storage > layers. > > This split maps neatly to Ori and Aaron's respective skill-sets and > experience, which makes for an effective partnership. Having Aaron > formally move to a performance role both recognizes the work Aaron is > already doing, and it lays the groundwork for a process for meeting > performance challenges that leverages their diversity of expertise. > > Please join me in thanking Aaron for taking on this role! > > Rob > > [1] Steve Souders is formerly Head Performance Engineer at Google and > "Chief Performance Yahoo!" at Yahoo. Performance Golden Rule: > > http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2012/02/10/the-performance-golden-rule/ > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager for Platform Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
