Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2012/February

 Engineering metrics in January:
 * unique committers contributed code to MediaWiki.
 * About code commits were reviewed.
 * The total number of unreviewed commits went from 44 to.
 * About shell requests were processed.
 * developers got commit access, among which volunteers.
 * Wikimedia Labs now hosts projects,  instances and  users.

Major news in January include:

Hover your mouse over the green question marks to see the description of a particular project.

Recent events

 * Pune hackathon (10–12 February 2012, Pune, India) —


 * GLAMcamp DC (10–12 February 2012, Washington, D.C., USA) —

Upcoming events

 * Chennai Hackathon March 2012 (17 March 2012, Chennai, India) —


 * Berlin hackathon (13 June 2012, Berlin, Germany) —


 * Wikimania hackathon (10-11 July 2012, Washington, DC, USA) —

Job openings
Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We have a lot of hiring coming up, and we really love talking to active community members about these roles.


 * Developers and engineers:
 * Senior Software Engineer Front-end
 * Interaction Designer
 * Software Developer (Back-end, Data Analytics)
 * Software Developer (Rich Text Editing, Features)
 * Software Developer (Front-end)
 * QA Lead
 * Software Developer (Mobile)
 * Software Security Engineer
 * Operations Engineer (Labs)


 * Management & Product:
 * Director of Features Engineering
 * Technical Product Analyst


 * Requests for proposals:
 * Mobile UX — Help us redesign our mobile platform and apps as more and more visitors access Wikipedia and its sister sites via mobile devices.
 * Mobile QA — Help us set up testing and automation processes for all Wikimedia Mobile projects.

Short news

 * David Schoonover joined the Platform engineering team as Systems Engineer for Data Analytics (announcement).
 * Jon Robson joined the Mobile engineering team as Software Developer for Mobile (announcement).
 * Terry Chay joined the Wikimedia Foundation as Director of Features Engineering (announcement).
 * Christian Aistleitner joined the Operations team as a contractor working on the XML dump infrastructure (announcement).
 * Christian Aistleitner joined the Operations team as a contractor working on the XML dump infrastructure (announcement).

Site infrastructure

 * Data Centers —


 * Media Storage — February saw Swift deployed to production to serve thumbnail requests 3 weeks earlier than anticipated.  There were a few bugs that we fixed, but overall the deploy process went very smoothly.  Graphs of Swift's performance are in ganglia.  The next steps are doing some more work around documentation and maintenance procedures, then creating a mirror cluster in Eqiad.  Swift in Labs and original media in Swift are also on the road map.


 * HTTPS —

Testing environment

 * Wikimedia Labs —

Backups and data archives

 * Data Dumps — We now have a copy of all dumps on a secondary host in another data center.  We've been working with two organizations on full mirrors of the dumps, sorting out performance issues before they can go live.  Christian (QChris) has got the beginning of a rough test framework for the dumps working.  We've made contact with folks at the Internet Archive and we're working on scripts using the S3 api to push our historical dump archive to their servers.  The source code has been moved to our git repo, and we're in the middle of the transition to MW 1.19, checking that the dumps work correctly for migrated projects.

Other news

 * wikitech:Site issue February 2012
 * wikitech:Site issue February 2012

Mobile

 * Android Wikipedia App —

Over a million installs, with an updated version in beta now. Beta switches from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap for location displays, giving us better cross-platform compatibility. iOS version of the app continues to make progress towards beta.


 * WikipediaZero —


 * Wikipedia over SMS/USSD —


 * GPS Storage/Retrieval —


 * FeaturedFeeds —


 * Wiktionary app --

Offline

 * Kiwix UX initiative —

Future
The engineering management team continues to update the Software deployments page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the engineering roadmap, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.