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On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Brion Vibber<brion@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Now, if we really think of a _totally badass title_ before we get the
> business cards printed up I'm open to changing it, but honestly I like
> it and it fits the role I see for myself just fine. :)

Or you could have two sets of business cards. :-)

-Kat
is not sure she can come up with anything badass enough for Brion, actually...


--
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On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Brion Vibber<brion@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> * ensure that the developers have what they need and are coding smoothly
>

Personally, I'm just waiting for Mediawiki to become self-aware and start
coding itself :)

-Chad

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On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 19:32, Kat Walsh <mindspillage@gmail.com> wrote:

> Or you could have two sets of business cards. :-)
>

And here I was going to suggest a slashed title: "Senior Software
Architect/Lead Hacker". (Maybe "Senior Software Architect/Sourceror" if
he's the eighth son of an eighth son.)

Congratulations on doing the job of two, Brion. I hope we find a good CTO
to handle the management side for you.

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Jim Redmond
[[User:Jredmond]]
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Somehow I'm not disappointed that we're having a problem trying to
find a title to describe how incredibly awesome Brion is.

Congrats.
-Dan
On Aug 8, 2009, at 8:45 PM, Jim Redmond wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 19:32, Kat Walsh <mindspillage@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Or you could have two sets of business cards. :-)
>>
>
> And here I was going to suggest a slashed title: "Senior Software
> Architect/Lead Hacker". (Maybe "Senior Software Architect/
> Sourceror" if
> he's the eighth son of an eighth son.)
>
> Congratulations on doing the job of two, Brion. I hope we find a
> good CTO
> to handle the management side for you.
>
> --
> Jim Redmond
> [[User:Jredmond]]
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


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2009/8/9 Kat Walsh <mindspillage@gmail.com>:
> On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Brion Vibber<brion@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> Now, if we really think of a _totally badass title_ before we get the
>> business cards printed up I'm open to changing it, but honestly I like
>> it and it fits the role I see for myself just fine. :)
>
> Or you could have two sets of business cards. :-)
>
> -Kat
> is not sure she can come up with anything badass enough for Brion, actually...

Well, as long as it's not something lame like "I'm the CEO... bitch",
as the leader of "a fellow Web 2.0 property" (eurgh) apparently
has/had, I'm quite sure Brion's call on his title would work fine. :-)

J.
--
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jdforrester@wikimedia.org | jdforrester@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

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On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 5:43 PM, Chad<innocentkiller@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Brion Vibber<brion@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> * ensure that the developers have what they need and are coding smoothly
>>
>
> Personally, I'm just waiting for Mediawiki to become self-aware and start
> coding itself :)

If SkyNet is PHP based, we have hope after all...


--
-george william herbert
george.herbert@gmail.com

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On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Brion Vibber <brion@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On 8/7/09 2:35 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > By containing the magic words "senior" and "architect" the proposed
> > "Senior Software Architect" is, in my experience, not inconsistent
> > with industry naming practice for the most important tech guru who
> > isn't primarily a manager.
> >
> > It's not a bad title in any case.
> >
> > (I was previously a manager and made a decision to hire a boss because
> > I realized I'd rather be doing technical work than performance
> > reviews. These days I'm just a lowly 'Senior … Engineer', and I'm
> > quite happy with that, thank you very much)
>
> Exactly.
>
> Now, if we really think of a _totally badass title_ before we get the
> business cards printed up I'm open to changing it, but honestly I like
> it and it fits the role I see for myself just fine. :)


My favorite title of all time, and I think the undisputed winner of the most
badass title of all time, is Chief Internet Evangelist. You could be the
Chief MediaWiki Evangelist, although architect does have a nice ring to it
for the time being. Perhaps later on in your career you'll take on the role
of Chief Wiki Evangelist.
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My favorite is "Chief Handshaker". :)
------Original Message------
From: Brian
Sender: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
ReplyTo: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
Sent: Aug 8, 2009 8:57 PM

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Brion Vibber <brion@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On 8/7/09 2:35 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > By containing the magic words "senior" and "architect" the proposed
> > "Senior Software Architect" is, in my experience, not inconsistent
> > with industry naming practice for the most important tech guru who
> > isn't primarily a manager.
> >
> > It's not a bad title in any case.
> >
> > (I was previously a manager and made a decision to hire a boss because
> > I realized I'd rather be doing technical work than performance
> > reviews. These days I'm just a lowly 'Senior … Engineer', and I'm
> > quite happy with that, thank you very much)
>
> Exactly.
>
> Now, if we really think of a_totally badass title_ before we get the
> business cards printed up I'm open to changing it, but honestly I like
> it and it fits the role I see for myself just fine. :)


My favorite title of all time, and I think the undisputed winner of the most
badass title of all time, is Chief Internet Evangelist. You could be the
Chief MediaWiki Evangelist, although architect does have a nice ring to it
for the time being. Perhaps later on in your career you'll take on the role
of Chief Wiki Evangelist.
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Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®
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High Priest of Mediawiki?




________________________________
From: Dan Rosenthal <swatjester@gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 8, 2009 5:59:14 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split

Somehow I'm not disappointed that we're having a problem trying to
find a title to describe how incredibly awesome Brion is.

Congrats.
-Dan
On Aug 8, 2009, at 8:45 PM, Jim Redmond wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 19:32, Kat Walsh <mindspillage@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Or you could have two sets of business cards. :-)
>>
>
> And here I was going to suggest a slashed title: "Senior Software
> Architect/Lead Hacker". (Maybe "Senior Software Architect/
> Sourceror" if
> he's the eighth son of an eighth son.)
>
> Congratulations on doing the job of two, Brion. I hope we find a
> good CTO
> to handle the management side for you.
>
> --
> Jim Redmond
> [[User:Jredmond]]
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


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On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 01:43, George Herbert<george.herbert@gmail.com> wrote:
> I suspect you're going to have to be prepared to do a lot of internal
> discovery and discovery with potential hires to show them the web ops
> side - it's not well documented now (I keep meaning to find out more
> about the ops team and finding I have no time to join the IRC channel
> 24x7 ;-P ).  The team seems to function well - servers seem decently
> stable - but it's not clear to me if the process and documentation is
> up to industry standards for large website operations.  At some point
> tribal knowledge has to yield to documentation and process and
> organizational knowledge.

I have a question on this for the tech team: as a rule, do you have a
high turnover of volunteers on the sysadmin rather than the dev side,
or has it remained mainly constant over the past few years?
Considering the future, better documentation (assuming you don't
already have such things privately) would be no bad thing.

The rest of Wikimedia and our projects have extensive procedural
documentation because while there are old-timers around, there are
also people who have less time to give and move around between
activities, which has both advantages and disadvantages within a
largely volunteer organisation such as ours.

S

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OpenPGP KeyID: 0x25F4EAB7

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On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Geoffrey Plourde<geo.plrd@yahoo.com> wrote:
> High Priest of Mediawiki?

I propose robes as his official outfit, similar to this:
http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Stallman/index.shtml


Magnus

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Hi!

> I have a question on this for the tech team: as a rule, do you have a
> high turnover of volunteers on the sysadmin ...

turn-what?
Jens is building a house or something, if that was your question.

Domas

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On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 10:16 PM, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi!
>
> > I have a question on this for the tech team: as a rule, do you have a
> > high turnover of volunteers on the sysadmin ...
>
> turn-what?
> Jens is building a house or something, if that was your question.
>
> Domas
>

A high turnover rate would indicate a lot of people joining and leaving,
instead of long-term volunteers.

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> A high turnover rate would indicate a lot of people joining and
> leaving,
> instead of long-term volunteers.

ah! that! no, site is operated by same people as five years ago (with
brilliant exception of search), few people left during that time,
because of various reasons.
some volunteers are not volunteers anymore though, being on foundation
payroll.

unfortunately, being 'sysadmin' of such site is more about running
around with debugger, profiler and compiler, rather than conventional
systems administration, and it is somewhat difficult to get people to
volunteer to do that (and certain things as full automatization of
cluster management are quite big projects, that require years of
experience and attention to detail).

Domas

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On 8/7/09 5:43 PM, George Herbert wrote:
> I suspect you're going to have to be prepared to do a lot of internal
> discovery and discovery with potential hires to show them the web ops
> side - it's not well documented now (I keep meaning to find out more
> about the ops team and finding I have no time to join the IRC channel
> 24x7 ;-P ). The team seems to function well - servers seem decently
> stable - but it's not clear to me if the process and documentation is
> up to industry standards for large website operations. At some point
> tribal knowledge has to yield to documentation and process and
> organizational knowledge.

Oh yes, this is already very much an ongoing process as we've been
increasing the ops staff this last year.

-- brion

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On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Brion Vibber <brion@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> With the increase in administrative and organizational duties, I've been
> less and less able to devote time to the part of the job that's nearest
> and dearest to me: working with our volunteer developer community and
> end users -- Wikimedians and other MediaWiki users alike -- who have
> bugs, patches, features, ideas, complaints, hopes and dreams that need
> attention.
>
> The last thing I want to be is a bottleneck that prevents our users from
> getting what they need, or our open source developers from being able to
> participate effectively!
>
> Multicore brain upgrades aren't yet available, so to keep us running at
> top speed I've suggested, and gotten Sue & Erik's blessing on, splitting
> out the components of my current CTO role into two separate positions:


This is great news. I look forward to upping my daily dose of vitamin B
(the supplements just didn't cut it).
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On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Brion Vibber<brion@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 8/7/09 5:43 PM, George Herbert wrote:
>> I suspect you're going to have to be prepared to do a lot of internal
>> discovery and discovery with potential hires to show them the web ops
>> side - it's not well documented now (I keep meaning to find out more
>> about the ops team and finding I have no time to join the IRC channel
>> 24x7 ;-P ).  The team seems to function well - servers seem decently
>> stable - but it's not clear to me if the process and documentation is
>> up to industry standards for large website operations.  At some point
>> tribal knowledge has to yield to documentation and process and
>> organizational knowledge.
>
> Oh yes, this is already very much an ongoing process as we've been
> increasing the ops staff this last year.


One addition that popped up in my head overnight.

You've been describing the role as CTO, but I think in US IT industry
standard naming schemes it's really more of a CIO role.

CTO tends to be associated with development (hardware/software), the
sort of role I understand Brion will be still handling going forwards.

CIO is more of the IT operations manager, both for inwards and
outwards facing environments. Large websites sometimes have CTO for
outwards facing IT environments, but with a breakdown of IT vs
development I think the standard industry naming may make more sense.

I understood what you had in mind from the first email, but I think a
typical IT candidate seeing CTO would think something very different
at first, and the label and first impression can make a big difference
in who you can find and how they approach the role.


--
-george william herbert
george.herbert@gmail.com

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On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:47 PM, George Herbert<george.herbert@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Brion Vibber<brion@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> On 8/7/09 5:43 PM, George Herbert wrote:
>>> I suspect you're going to have to be prepared to do a lot of internal
>>> discovery and discovery with potential hires to show them the web ops
>>> side - it's not well documented now (I keep meaning to find out more
>>> about the ops team and finding I have no time to join the IRC channel
>>> 24x7 ;-P ).  The team seems to function well - servers seem decently
>>> stable - but it's not clear to me if the process and documentation is
>>> up to industry standards for large website operations.  At some point
>>> tribal knowledge has to yield to documentation and process and
>>> organizational knowledge.
>>
>> Oh yes, this is already very much an ongoing process as we've been
>> increasing the ops staff this last year.
>
>
> One addition that popped up in my head overnight.
>
> You've been describing the role as CTO, but I think in US IT industry
> standard naming schemes it's really more of a CIO role.
>
> CTO tends to be associated with development (hardware/software), the
> sort of role I understand Brion will be still handling going forwards.
>
> CIO is more of the IT operations manager, both for inwards and
> outwards facing environments.  Large websites sometimes have CTO for
> outwards facing IT environments, but with a breakdown of IT vs
> development I think the standard industry naming may make more sense.
>
> I understood what you had in mind from the first email, but I think a
> typical IT candidate seeing CTO would think something very different
> at first, and the label and first impression can make a big difference
> in who you can find and how they approach the role.
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herbert@gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
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> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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>

This is a very true point. To people not in the industry, there seems to be
little distinction between the two titles. And a lot of companies only have
a CIO or CTO, further leading people to believe there is no difference.

There is certainly more "tech" involved in a CTO. Clever of them to put
the word in there :)

-Chad

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