Jon Robson
Principal Software Engineer at Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJon Robson is a Principal Software Engineer with 14 years of experience leading engineering efforts at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he progressed from developer to principal and now shapes architecture and delivery for one of the web’s largest open platforms. He specializes in backend engineering, PHP, mobile-responsive design, and open source maintenance—contributing notable refactors to the MediaWiki core that improved maintainability and mobile UX for Wikipedia. Based in San Francisco, he combines hands-on coding with technical leadership, mentoring teams and driving standards across long-lived codebases. His background includes commercial web development at BT and earlier tooling work at Airbus, giving him a pragmatic balance of enterprise and community-driven engineering. Collected technical strengths and a Computer Science degree from the University of York underpin a focus on clean, sustainable design rather than short-term hacks.
13 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BSc) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BSc) Computer Science at University of York
Github Skills (7)
css10
php10
mediawiki10
web-development9
mobile-development8
javascript7
html6
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
wikimedia/mediawiki
Aug 2012 - Jan 2023
🌻 The collaborative editing software that runs Wikipedia. Mirror from https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/core. See https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_access for contributing.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:515 commits in 10 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Jon primarily contributed to the MediaWiki core, focusing on the refactoring of code to align with the recent design guide and improve the overall code maintainability. Their work includes modifications to the table of contents rendering, navigation bar, and menu structures, and adjustments to various CSS elements and general code cleanup and standardizations. The user has worked on enhancements related to mobile and responsive design, implementing mobile-friendly styling for special pages.
wikimediaphpwikipediacollaborative-editingruns
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