Wikimedia Technical Talks

Tech talks are short presentations with community question and answer sessions. They are usually under an hour in length and focus on a specific technical topic.

For information on setting up a Tech talk, see Project:Calendar/How to schedule an event

We usually present tech talks using Google Hangouts On Air, which makes them available on YouTube. There is a concurrent IRC office hour for questions on IRC, so the talks also appear there.

Nominations/Ideas for future tech talks

 * Legal/licensing -Stephen LaPorte June 2015. status: scheduling


 * Timo Tijhof (Krinkle) on grunt tasks and taking advantage of our default `npm test` infrastructure
 * Rob proposes that Timo (or someone in frontend) speaks about mixins.


 * The work Analytics engineering are doing and how we could help
 * An understanding of Flow, where it's at and where it's going
 * Where the current pain points for the Fundraising team are - Sherah Smith?
 * on the new visual design for MediaWiki/mediawiki.ui or whatever that library is called these days.
 * QA (Zeljiko? Chris?) about browser testing
 * Daniel Kinzler on core refactoring of Title and other classes.
 * Pau Giner on dos and don'ts in user testing
 * Niklas Laxström on conversing with robots that know Wikipedia (part of his Phd research)
 * Antoine Musso on Jenkins - status: emailed Antoine/Antoine on paternity leave. hold.
 * Moriel Schottlender on right-to-left support (adapting her blog post into a talk)
 * Wikidata - Lydia/Community member - open to all
 * Tony Tomasz -
 * Webinar on Zotero translator coding
 * Aaron Halfaker on machine learning support for wiki-workflows.
 * James Forrester, Ed Sanders, ...?, 2017 wikitext editor, TBD in early October if possible

Past tech talks
You can browse through past tech talk recordings in the Commons category and on the MediaWiki YouTube channel.


 * 18 March 2016 - New readership data. Some things we've been learning recently about how Wikipedia is read (video, slides)
 * 29 February 2016 - Automated citations in Wikipedia: Citoid and the technology behind it (YouTube)
 * 8 February 2016 - A Hands-on Estimation Exercise
 * 14 January 2016 - Creating Useful Dashboards with Grafana(abstract)
 * 15 December 2015 - The creation of Histography, from concept to design
 * 9 December 2015 - Secure Coding For MediaWiki Developers
 * 3 November 2015 - The making of a MediaWiki skin(abstract)
 * 2 November 2015 - Nothing Left but Always Right: The Twisted Road to RTL Support (YouTube, slides)
 * 23 October, 2015 - Introduction to Free and Open Source Licensing at Wikimedia - Stephen LaPorte
 * 20 August, 2015 - ELK: Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana at Wikimedia (WebM format on Commons, also on YouTube) - Bryan Davis (slides)
 * 18 August, 2015 - Let's talk about web performance - Peter Hedenskog
 * 15 June, 2015 - Kanban: An alternative to Scrum? - Kevin Smith (slides)
 * 14 May, 2015 - Graphs! Visualize maps and data graphs live on Wikipedia - Yuri Astrakhan and Dan Andreescu
 * 14 April, 2015 - The state of Team Health across Wikimedia Engineering - Kristen Lans
 * 4 March, 2015 - Hack - An Evolution of PHP - Josh Watzman from Facebook
 * 6 January, 2015 - A developer's-eye view of API client libraries - Frances Hocutt
 * 11 December, 2014 - Phabricator for Wikimedia Projects - Quim Gil and Andre Klapper
 * 25 November, 2014 - MediaWiki-Vagrant What is New With MediaWiki Vagrant with Bryan Davis and Dan Duvall (slides, video)
 * 03 November, 2014 - Language Engineering: Content Translation Tool - Joel Sahleen
 * 22 October, 2014 - Design Research in Product Development - Abbey Ripstra
 * 06 October, 2014 - The Dashboarding Problem - Dan Andreescu and Nuria Ruiz
 * 24 September, 2014 - The Very Basics of Phabricator - Andre Klapper
 * 29 July, 2014 - HHVM in production: what that means for Wikimedia developers - Paul Tarjan
 * 15 July, 2014 - Hadoop and Beyond. An overview of Analytics infrastructure - Andrew Otto
 * 11 June, 2014 - How, What, Why of WikiFont - May Galloway and Monte Hurd
 * 15 May, 2014 - Elasticsearch - Nik Everett
 * 15 April, 2014 - A preliminary look at Parsoid internals - Subramanya Sastry and Gabriel Wicke