I’m pleased to announced that Wes Reid has joined the Wiki Education team as a Software Developer. In his new role, he’ll be working with me to maintain the Wiki Education Dashboard — our open source web app built with React and Ruby on Rails that empowers thousands of instructors, librarians, and others across the globe to organize newcomer-friendly Wikipedia editing projects and track the contributions of these new Wikipedians.
Wes is passionate about education, equitable access, and technology. An educator turned software developer, he has worked in a number of positions near and dear to our values at Wiki Education. After graduating from college, Wes worked in non-profits supporting both professionals and first generation college students in finding their desired career. He then transitioned to software development five years ago, where he worked for tech non-profit Democracy Works building tools and gathering data to make it easier to vote. Most recently he worked as an instructor and developer at Galvanize, where he trained adults to enter the workforce as software developers.
As Software Developer at Wiki Education, Wes creates new features on the Dashboard that help people do more and better work on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and other free educational projects. He fixes bugs, solves user experience problems, makes accessibility improvements, and removes performance bottlenecks. His role also includes maintaining a newcomer-friendly codebase, which allows for his mentoring of interns and volunteer code contributors. Given Wes’ previous experience with Ruby on Rails; his current experience with JavaScript, React, and Redux; as well as his past and current experience of mentorship and education, he’s a great fit for this role. We’re excited to welcome him to our team and community.
