Enter the Solutions Architect

Greetings! My name is John Weisgerber, and I recently joined Transifex in the role of Solutions Architect. This introductory post is just to introduce myself to the Tx community and tell you a little about what I’ll be up to and why I’m excited to be a part of this team.

Who's that now?

For those of you who don’t already know me I have been, as they say, “around the block”. During my  career in localization I have worked in almost every corner of the industry as a freelancer, a project and operations manager (both buyer and supplier), and as a developer of machine translation and translation management technology. I have pushed for the adaptation of rigid translation workflows to support the evolution from waterfall to agile localization and then to continuous translation, usually sitting at the painful intersection where older translation technologies failed to meet current and emerging content translation needs. This experience has instilled in me the conviction that technology informed by deep knowledge about the translation process is the only solution to the relentless demand for continuous localization, which in the end is how all content wants to be.

And so I am eager to contribute to the future success of Transifex, which has been a pioneer and leader in continuous localization since 2006. Since joining this team I have been impressed by two things. First is company-wide dedication to innovation rather than just copycat feature developments. Second is the commitment, straight from the top, to sustain a company culture of transparency and inclusivity and to live those values every day. I expect great things to come.

Tell me more...

As Solutions Architect my role will include leading the professional services team. Among the inviolable laws of localization is that there are thousands of minor obstacles that can impede a smooth continuous translation workflow. These arise from the bubbling stream of new apps to integrate with, new file formats to parse, and the fact that software development platforms are finally beginning to take internationalization seriously and account for the rich variety of human language. Transifex can overcome such obstacles in partnership with our customers to put your localization workflow truly on rails. Let’s make it happen and enable your team to focus on delighting users with engaging apps and content rather than pushing data around. That’s the machine’s job after all.

I’ll be posting periodically here on this blog with tips on best practices or notes about localization trends. You can also find me in the Transifex community. Or just reach out any time you see me at an event or via email to ask a question or swap some war stories. If I don’t have an off-the-shelf solution for you, I’d love to craft you one. In any case I can guarantee that I’ll have an opinion to share.