What’s in a Name?
Here at The New Stack, we are big believers that people are the prime-movers in information technology and open source software development. One of the things we do that you may not see at other sites is to provide links in our posts to learn more about the people who contribute to TNS. Each post we get from an outside contributor, we include a short bio that gives readers more of an idea of the contributor’s background. For instance, for a recent contributed piece on Apache Spark from Pivotal, we learned that lead author Robert Bennet actually has a physics background, with experience in “cross-section and double helicity asymmetry in direct photon production.”
In our regular news stories, each person we interview or quote is linked to a site with more information about that person as well. Partially, this is a trick to ensure we spell the names correctly in the article — it is easier to doublecheck if a link is included. But it is also to provide some context to the reader about who is offering the expertise. Preferably, we’d like to link to a person’s Twitter account — which shows what they are thinking about today — or a LinkedIn page, which clearly shows their current and past jobs. If the subject programs in open source, we will instead link to their GitHub page — nothing speaks like experience than live code. Best of all, for those who still maintain one, we link to that person’s home page on the web. Not everyone has a home page, but those who do certainly take IT very seriously.
One person who does still maintain a personal presence on the web has been Julia Grace, Slack’s senior director of infrastructure engineering; we did a Q&A with Julia Grace that appeared on the site last week. Be sure to read that Q&A to learn more about Grace's philosophy when it comes to microservices and DevOps, rapid scalability, build versus buy, the importance of diversity, and the best architectural choices when it comes to scalability systems.
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