User:Zakgreant

Übersicht Hi! I'm Zak Greant, a writer and open source jack o' trades. I'm consulting with the Wikimedia Foundation with a focus on the MediaWiki developer documentation and the Wikipedia technical operations documentation. What I'm doing Look at my reports, daily logs, global activity feed or Mediawiki.org Manual namespace activity feed to find out what I am doing and working on. What I'm planning to do Visit my todo list to see what small tasks I should be working on. Look at the Objectives section of my current weekly report (displayed to the right) to see my focus for this week. About me I've been engaged with Free Software and Open Source for most of my adult life, starting with Perl in 1996 (then quickly moving to PHP.) My work as a profession tech editor and writer in began 2000. I use the Colemak keyboard layout (no repetitive strain injuries since 2008, yay!), Vim editor, Mac OS X on my laptop and Ubuntu on my desktop. See the #Background section below if you'd like to know a bit more about me. Contact Info Blog http://zak.greant.com E-Mail [email protected] IRC zakg on irc://irc.freenode.net#mediawiki Jabber [email protected] Skype zak_greant

Report for Week 48 of 2010 (Nov. 29 to Dec. 5) ◄   22 November 2010 View All Reports 6 December 2010   ► Summary: ... (For more information on this report format, read meta:Weekly_Reports.) Objectives for This Week What I hope to do this week. (Check next week's report to see how I did.) Get all the content from the pair doc sessions into the manual or source ... Edit report Log for 2024-09-16 PST/PDT

Office Hours

I'm usually on irc://irc.freenode.net#mediawiki when I'm working.

One Wednesdays/Thursdays (depending where you are) each month, I host IRC office hours sessions that focus on discussing work on the developer documentation, along with related topics. I'll post hours here when the next session is scheduled.

Background

I've had a few questions about my background. Here's a quick summary:

1990: Dropped out of high school.
1991: Worked various dead-end job(s).
1992: Dropped out of cooking school.
1993: Worked dead-end job(s).
1994: Started web-business with mother and brother. Learned HTML.
1995: Posted first real website.
1996: Learned enough Perl to build a postcard site. Started learning PHP. Met future wife, fell in love. Quit day job at dental lab.
1997: Co-founded first web startup.
1998: Year a blur of startup madness. First archived post on the PHP mailing lists [1]
1999: Startup failed. Went to work at ISP. Co-founded PHP Quality Assurance Team.
2000: First tech edit (PHP Developer's Cookbook). Began work on first book as lead author (PHP Functions Essential Reference)
2001: Quit ISP to finish book / first speaking engagement at conference. Started working at MySQL AB (a startup) as technical evangelist and community manager.
2002: Spoke at many conferences. Dealt with MySQL client libraries licensing kerfuffle. Co-authored MySQL GPL exception. Started traveling for ~50% of the year.
2003: Spoke at many, many conferences.
2004: Spoke at many, many conferences. Quit MySQL. Went to work at Sxip (a startup). Became member of the Free Software Foundation's license compliance team.
2005: Quit startup. Started work at eZ Systems (a startup) as their Director of Free Software and Open Source Affairs. Started work at the Mozilla Foundation as their Ombudslizard.
2006: Opened and managed North American office for eZ Systems.
2007: Worked far too much.
2008: Worked far, far too much. Cut travel schedule back to sane levels. Joined Open Source Initiative as volunteer.
2009: Quit eZ Systems. quit Mozilla. Co-founded my own startup.
2010: Startup on back burner. Began consulting for Wikimedia Foundation.

Along the way, I've spoken at over sixty free software, open source and technology events, and have helped chair or organize over a dozen of these events. I've also continued to be active as a writer and editor, having served as a technical editor on a few dozen technical books (including Mastering Regular Expressions (3rd ed.) by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, Advanced PHP Programming by Georg Schlossnagle and MySQL (3rd Edition) by Paul DuBois.)

Software and Tools

• MediaWiki History Sparklines – A Greasemonkey extension for Firefox that uses jQuery, jQuery Sparklines and the MediaWiki API to display sparklines (small graphs) of recent changes to MediaWiki pages. Useful to quickly see if a page is out-of-date or note. Screenshots, source, feature requests and more at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/79234
• I use the Simpler English Dictionary add-on for Firefox to help me use Simple English words. Visit

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Using+the+spell+checker?s=dictionary&as=s#Adding_dictionaries for help on using the dictionary.