Niklas Laxström
Engineering Manager at Self employed
Helsinki, Finland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNiklas Laxström is an Engineering Manager and longtime MediaWiki specialist with 20 years of experience building localization and internationalization infrastructure from the code level to community operations. He founded translatewiki.net, a platform that coordinates thousands of volunteer translators across 200+ languages, and has maintained translation tooling used widely across Wikimedia projects. Hands-on across stack and languages, he contributes to core MediaWiki and notable projects like Semantic MediaWiki and jquery.ime, fixing JS/PHP bugs, improving language support and input methods for minority languages. Based in Helsinki, he pairs engineering leadership at the Wikimedia Foundation with ongoing consulting and product work, often turning nuanced linguistic requirements into practical technical solutions. Notably, his career combines deep language-technology training (M.A.) with decades of volunteer-driven open source stewardship.
21 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Abitur, Abitur at PäivöläM.A., Language Technology, M.A., Language Technology at Helsingin yliopisto
Finnish, English, Swedish, Russian, German
Stackoverflow
31reputation
242reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (23)
transliteration10
mediawiki10
javascript10
jquery10
wikipedia10
localize10
php10
localization10
front-end-development10
locale10
apidoc9
css9
api9
html9
database8
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
wikimedia/jquery.ime
Nov 2012 - Apr 2020
jQuery based input methods library
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:20 reviews, 31 commits, 26 PRs in 7 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Niklas primarily contributed to the user interface and functionality of the jQuery-based input methods library. Their work involved adding and modifying input method definitions for various languages, including Finnish, Sanskrit, and Ludic, by adjusting the JavaScript rules. They also updated the code to improve the UI, added tests, fixed spelling mistakes and improved the styling.
input-methodjquery
SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki
Jul 2012 - Jun 2022
🔗 Semantic MediaWiki turns MediaWiki into a knowledge management platform with query and export capabilities
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 58 commits, 17 PRs in 10 years
Contributions summary:Niklas contributed to the Semantic MediaWiki project by addressing bugs, improving code quality, and updating translations. Their work included fixing JavaScript issues on the Special:Ask page, removing a non-existent class from the autoloader, and fixing incorrect cases in the code. The user also updated the Norwegian translations for datatypes, ensuring better internationalization support. They demonstrated proficiency in modifying PHP files and JavaScript code related to the MediaWiki platform.
mediawikisemantic-mediawikismwsemanticrdf
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