User:Cpiral

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Answering technical questions at Help talk:CirrusSearch and at Wikipedia is one way I volunteer.

MediaWiki
Here, I lead the development of User:Cpiral/CirrusSearch, a version of Help:CirrusSearch that's 98% informative of search box usage, and is 88% polished in style. The current public version of Help:CirrusSearch is important for translating purposes, but it's only 70% informative and 50% polished.

I joined up with Phabricator [//phabricator.wikimedia.org/search/query/Fo0rTDBo2u89/ joined up with phabricator], where I opened over a dozen issues.

Wikipedia
On Wikipedia I lead the development of:
 * Search: w:Help:Searching/Draft,
 * Search Templates: w:Template:Regex (and w:Template:template usage and w:Template:Search link and w:Template:Linksto)
 * Numerous Help pages, w:WP:Page name, w:Help:Linking, etc.
 * w:Template:Val documentation

On Wikipedia since 2006, I edit articles, but mostly I edit help pages, and eventually I got into templates. I'm most interested in Search. I've developed two templates to help teach and practice regexp searches on Wikipedia: (See W:Template:Template usage and W:Template:regex.) I've re-done a dozen help pages on Wikipedia, such as W:Help:Searching and W:wp:pagename.

Technical background
I have worked with software releases and field testing for Motorola's CDMA networks. I have an electrical engineering degree and my career was a decade in telecom, bringing up Ericsson and Motorola Cellular systems. I've done a lot of software upgrades, for cellular telephone switches, and other network nodes, both in the lab, and in the field all over the world.

Technical
I coddle computers. So
 * Languages are a favorite hobby of mine. C and C++ environments are familiar territory.
 * Linux. I've installed and configured several Linux systems, and also FreeBSD.
 * Text processing. I excel in regex (grep, perl sed, awk), and Vim.
 * I prefer the CLI and the keyboard, so my browser and window managers are bound to keys.
 * Software development. I've written several medium sized apps in Perl, in Bash, and in Vim. I've done several database applications.

Personal
I've written a mountain technical and an ocean of prose. I spend most of my spare time
 * writing in my VimWiki and my paper notebooks
 * digesting tech news (http://www.osnews.com, http://www.lwn.net)
 * improving Wikipedia
 * volunteering at MediaWiki