Thread:Talk:Wikimedia engineering 20% policy/Suggested replacement: LevelUp

This is a draft of my idea for replacing 20% time with a new program for WMF engineers. It's called LevelUp.


 * It's quarterly, not weekly
 * It permanently increases our community code review capacity
 * It grows you as a technical leader

Plan:

Every engineer or sysadmin at WMF has a quarterly goal: either to get more domain knowledge on a particular repo/codebase, or to coach a particular mentee to get +2 privileges on a repo. So, some WMFers will coach other WMFers, and some will coach volunteers. Sumana will help matchmake and find volunteers.

You can learn by reviewing code and hacking with your mentor, and you can teach by metareviewing your mentee's code reviews, hacking with them, and so on.

I predict that, at the end of 1 quarter of this, our code review backlog will be about the same as it is now. But after 2 quarters, it'll go down, because we'll have more reviewers and maintainers of MediaWiki core and the extensions we care about.

(needed: table of component ownership across MW core, extensions, & server architecture)