This is wonderful news all around: our brilliant sysadmin, Ken Snider, has been made head of tech operations for Wikimedia, and will be keeping Wikipedia humming henceforth! Congrats Ken, and congrats Wikimedia! You folks were made for each other:
A bit more about Ken: Ken was apparently genetically predisposed to
become a sysadmin since he joined one of Canada’s first large ISPs,
Primus, straight out of school in 1997 and helped build their
infrastructure til 2001. He then joined a startup called OpenCOLA in
2001 which was co-founded by Cory Doctorow and developed early P2P
precursors to tools like BitTorrent and Steam. It’s best known today
for the development of an open source (GPL’d) cola recipe which is
still in use (more than 150,000 cans sold if Wikipedia is to be
believed).Ken got involved in one of Cory’s pet projects, BoingBoing.net which
some of you may have heard of ;-), and has been their sysadmin since
2003. After a stint from 2001-2005 at DataWire, Ken became Director of
Tech Ops at Federated Media, a role he held from 2005-2012.
As you can see, I've known Ken for more than a decade, and I rate him as the best sysadmin I know.