Monday, March 10th, 2014

Welcome Jon

Back in January, we announced that the search was on for a new programmer—one who’d be devoted entirely to LibraryThing.com, and there’s been much excitement. Today, I’m pleased to say that the search has ended!

Everyone, meet Jon Kiparsky (long-time LT member kiparsky), our new developer! Say hi on his profile, or on the “Welcome Jon” talk topic.

Jon was born in Boston and has never lived more than a hundred miles from an ocean. He has a degree in Linguistics from Reed College, and his career has been varied, with past positions including tech writer, music label bigwig, radio personality, and sound tech.

Jon spends his non-programming time playing music (largely Irish session tunes), brewing beer and mead, and studying math, and he’s working very hard on controlling his nearly Tourette-like tendency to spout atrocious puns with little provocation or warning. He also translates fiction from German, Spanish, and Portuguese into English—having learned Portuguese in order to read Jose Saramago stories that hadn’t been released in his native tongue.

Favorite authors include: Iain M. Banks, Douglas Hofstadter, Raymond Smullyan, Steven Brust, and Theodore Sturgeon (but no guarantees that asking again will produce the same list)

Jon’s job at LibraryThing is a big one. He’ll be working with Tim on LibraryThing.com, developing features, fixing bugs and improving performance. We expect great things from him. But it’s going to take him a few weeks to ease into how we do things, so don’t expect everything to get better immediately!

So, who gets $1,000 in books?

Many of you may remember that we offered a bounty of $1,000 worth of books to whoever managed to connect us with our new developer. That lucky individual is Jon’s girlfriend, Nadia, an archivist who saw Tim mention the job on Twitter! Many thanks to you, Nadia, and enjoy your books!

Labels: employees

17 Comments:

  1. Jonathan says:

    Congratulations Jon!

  2. Deb says:

    Best wishes, Jon!

  3. Jim B says:

    Welcome Jon!
    (Did you know that everyone is born left handed?
    Yep
    They only become right-handed when they make their first mistake.)
    🙂

  4. Susan says:

    Your job sounds like it’s going to be FUN!! Congratulations!

  5. Sue Molnar says:

    Failte, Jon. Hope you love it.

  6. Ashfaq Ilahi says:

    Congratulations John…

  7. Allie Farrell says:

    Congratulations, Jon, and welcome to LibraryThing!

  8. bokai says:

    A Irish session playing linguist? This guy has it figured out. Grats to Jon and Nadia!

  9. Cat Miller says:

    Jon,
    Congrats and welcome to LibraryThing!It’s good to see another left handed cat IT person 🙂

  10. Boobalack says:

    I sent a welcome message to Jon’s page before I saw this and said that any man who likes cats and books and can program computers is fine (or something like that). Now I see that he’s also a lover of music and puns and studies mathematics (one of my college majors). Not only that, he’s cute! Be still my heart — the perfect man! Too bad I’m married, old enough to be his grandmother, and he has a girlfriend. Congratulations on winning the books and on your choice of men, Nadia. :-}

  11. Congratulazioni Jon e in bocca al lupo! siamo disponibili a collaborare

    Congratulations Jon and good luck! we are willing to cooperate

  12. Congratulations to Jon! I so appreciate the work you all do at LibraryThing. And many thanks to Loranne! – Donna Balancia

  13. koolwryter says:

    Hi, I am so glad you are here! You sound like someone I would talk about books with 🙂 Hopefully, you will be able to fix some of these issues with library thing. I have an important question to ask the community, but my post keeps getting deleted automatically. Bummer…oh well I guess. Looking forward to see what you can do!

  14. brinticus says:

    Whoa, Jon! You have about the most excellent programming gig ever, now. Congrats.

  15. Dougl Brotchie says:

    A warm welcome to LibraryThing from a longtime user.
    I look forward to seeing great and wondrous things! 🙂

  16. chad henry says:

    Wow, Linguistics? I started out as a Linguistics major at U of Washington but couldn’t get past the dry as dust 101 courses in the subject–a big bucket of cold water on my idealist dreams of being a linguist. Now I just research meanings of family and first names, and hobby with etymology just for fun. Welcome, Jon.

  17. Adeeba Zamaan says:

    Congratulations, Jon, this is an excellent thing, and you have my kittycat. You know, don’t you, that this is the same kind of kitty who just went viral when she chased away that dog? So was mine. She defended me when I was under attack and woke me up when I had nightmares. She died on the Ides of March last year, and I’m still recovering. I did have a thing for calicoes, but I think I’ll wait this time for another of these “Kliban kitties,” as a friend of mine calls them. My love to yours.

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