Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/Onboarding

SSH keys generation
Generate two new SSH keys, be sure to use a memorable passphrase.

ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.wmfdev -t ed25519 -C "your_email@youremail.com"
 * For your WIkimedia developer account use:

ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.wmfprod -t ed25519 -C "your_email@youremail.com"
 * For your production account use:

You will now have 4 files in your  directory as follows: id_ed25519.wmfdev - Wikimedia developer account private key id_ed25519.wmfdev.pub - Wikimedia developer account public key id_ed25519.wmfprod - Wikimedia production account private key id_ed25519.wmfprod.pub - Wikimedia production account public key

We have a recommended .ssh/config to use.

Generating a GPG key

 * Run  and follow the prompts. Defaults are usually good, but use a 4096 bit length.
 * Then uploads public key to key server
 * Submit a patch for our PGP public key repo including only your public key


 * Reach out to Tyler to see about getting it signed. Requires two signatures.

Mailing lists descriptions

 * releng@lists.wikimedia.org - Private release engineering subteam list
 * engprod@lists.wikimedia.org - Private engineering productivity team list
 * ops@lists.wikimedia.org - Private ops list, includes all deployers
 * qa@lists.wikimedia.org - public list
 * security@wikimedia.org - (if appropriate) private alias for security issue reporting and follow-up
 * wikitech-l@wikimedia.org - public list for all things Wikimedia development

IRC Channel descriptions

 * #wikimedia-releng - team channel with task, code review, and monitoring bot announcements
 * #wikimedia-sre - SRE team channel
 * #wikimedia-staff - private WMF staff and contractors only channel, useful backchannel for staff-only meetings
 * #wikimedia-operations - most production server discussion happens here
 * #wikimedia-tech - general Wikimedia tech discussion
 * #wikimedia-dev - Wikimedia dev related bot announcements (tasks and code review)
 * #wikimedia-cloud and #wikimedia-cloud-admin - Cloud VPS (much of our CI infrastructure depends on Wikimedia Cloud VPS)

Team-related IRC access additions

 * Prerequisite: the user's nick must be registered with nick enforcement set to .  They should follow the IRC tutorial on meta.
 * Add the user to the access list for our private team channel using the  template:
 * Then add to invite list (so they don't have to invite themselves each time):
 * Give the user +v (voice) in #wikimedia-releng
 * Give the user +v (voice) in #wikimedia-releng
 * Give the user +v (voice) in #wikimedia-releng

= People to meet and things to do with them = The goal is to meet your team mates and learn how the team fits together. Hopefully you'll talk to everyone on the team one on one for about thirty minutes over the first week or two. Bookmark the contact list on officewiki — you will use it a lot :)

First day

 * Tyler Cipriani, manager of the Release Engineering team. He is normally in the US Mountain timezone.
 * Tell him everything is going great and that the instructions are easy to follow but you are still overwhelmed by the reading you have to do.
 * Tell him that you found some errors in the instruction and fixed the template. :P
 * Ask him to give you an overview of how the foundation is organized, what teams do what, and all that.
 * Make sure he adds you to any relevant team meetings.
 * He'll want to talk to you one on one a few times in the first week.

First couple of weeks
Meet the whole team:


 * Ahmon Dancy - Pacific timezone
 * Ask him about MediaWiki on Kubernetes, Emacs, databases, or Common Lisp.
 * Antoine Musso - Central European timezone
 * Ask him to tell you the origin story of our Continuous Integration infrastructure, including Beta Cluster.
 * Ask him all about French cooking and why it's the best country to live in.
 * Brennen Bearnes - Mountain timezone
 * Ask him about error logs, Vim, docker-compose, or GitLab.
 * Dan Duvall - Pacific timezone
 * Ask him about the Deployment Pipeline.
 * Ask him about maintaining the infrastructure for a website that got 99% of it's traffic in one month.
 * Jeena Huneidi
 * Ask her about Kubernetes, docker-compose, tea, or ponies.
 * Mukunda Modell - Central timezone
 * Ask him about Phabricator and why it's a game.
 * Ask him about his RX7.

More widely, Release Engineering is part of Engineering Productivity:


 * Engineering Productivity
 * Greg Grossmeier - Pacific timezone (Director of Engineering)
 * Quality & Test Engineering
 * Jean-Rene Branaa - Pacific timezone (Engineer Manager)
 * Ask him about Code Health and what it means here.
 * Ask him to tell you all about gaming and squirrels.
 * Željko Filipin - Central European timezone
 * Ask him about Selenium, continuous integration, MediaWiki-Vagrant.
 * Ask him about daylight saving time, juggling, Rubik's Cube, ukulele, Pareto principle, lightning talks, open space.
 * Others
 * Performance Engineering
 * Others

= Readings =

Check these out, bring any questions you have to Tyler or your onboarding buddy.


 * https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_tech_employee_orientation <-- important
 * https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Technical_onboarding_for_new_hires
 * https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Hire_Orientation_Videos
 * From SRE:
 * Life of a request presentation
 * Application layer deeper dive presentation
 * The "Kubernetes" (2018-11-16) presentation from https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Operations/Ops_sessions
 * https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-73-infrastructure-of-wikipedia
 * http://www.aosabook.org/en/mediawiki.html <-- lower priority, but interesting