Sam Smith

Staff Software Engineer at Wikimedia Foundation

United Kingdom

About

Wikimedia Foundation for 11 years. Before that Last.fm. I love all aspects building things that improve the status quo for users, including designing and coding. I'm as comfortable writing JavaScript as I am writing prose in a word processor. I am deeply concerned with doing things correctly. I take failures personally, which I'm working on. Ask me about my car.

Experience

  • Wikimedia Foundation (12 yrs 6 mos)
    • Staff Software Engineer
      Jul 2020 - Present · 6 yrs

      Tech Lead of the Experiment Platform team. I led the design and implementation of a privacy-conscious A/B testing platform to enable teams to run A/B tests quickly. I'm currently leading the integration of GrowthBook for experiment analysis and reporting, and developing a suite of standard metrics for teams to use in their experiments.

    • Senior Software Engineer
      Jan 2020 - Jul 2020 · 7 mos

    • Engineering Manager
      Jul 2017 - Jan 2020 · 2 yrs 7 mos

      I managed the Readers Web team (FKA Reading Web FKA Mobile Web), handling ongoing projects and participated in complex planning processes for future work. The projects included: Offline Content Generation and an improved treatment for printing pages, a new treatment for community-curated page tags, a technically and analytically complicated A/B test for SEO improvements. As well as the above, I helped my reports grow. We had regular 1:1s, we made career plans, we sought out growth opportunities, and we went through the promotion process.

  • Web Developer at Last.fm
    Aug 2011 - Jan 2014 · 2 yrs 6 mos

    I worked with – and improved! – a monolithic legacy codebase, both maintaining legacy features and helping to build new ones, using FOSS whenever possible. I did anything and everything from minor CSS tweaks to implementing a new "sign up with Facebook" flow to debugging Thrift clients.