Wikimedia Engineering/WMF Tech Days 2012

WMF Tech Days is an annual meeting of Wikimedia Foundation engineering staff and contractors, held next to the Wikimedia Foundation all-staff meeting. All Wikimedia Foundation employees and most engineering contractors will participate.

Due to limited space, this is an invitation-only event, but we'll aim to document things in public as much as possible.

To mitigate people's exhaustion and stress level, this event will not be held on a weekend, and the second day will be less meeting-focused and structured more like a hackathon.

What, when, and where, summary

 * Tue, Sep 11: Unconference.
 * Location: The Box (Howard & 7th St, Yelp link).
 * Official start at 10 AM.
 * Wed, Sep 12: Hackathon.
 * Location: The Box (Howard & 7th St, Yelp link).
 * Official start at 10 AM.

Web references

 * Use this very wiki page for schedule and clean, readable information about the event.
 * Use the Etherpad for messy, fun pre-event prep discussion and during-event meeting notes.

September 11 agenda
Start:

10:00am - Intro and Q&A by Sue. (1 large group, main room)

10:30 - 10 minute top line goals/roadmap review (Erik) (1 large group, main room)

10:45 - 11:05: Hear from each team a brief introduction (1 large group, main room)
 * What do you do / what's your goal?
 * What's your major pain point / blocker?
 * What are you most proud of as a team?

11:05 - 11:20: Topic seeding, part 1: People write up things they'd like to make sessions of (1 large group, main room)

11:20 - 11:35: Brief explanations of each topic, plus show-of-hands for who's interested in attending, followed by schedule wrangling (1 large group, main room)

11:35 - 11:40: 5 minute break

11:40 - Sessions start - break out, both rooms

12:30 - Lunch

13:30 - Sessions continue / Training track


 * Big room A:
 * Universal language selector; we should ask for slides
 * i18n discussion: note-taker needed
 * Big room B:
 * Agile discussion
 * Notes at Wikimedia_Engineering/WMF_Tech_Days_2012/TechDays-Agile by jon
 * Big room C:
 * MediaWiki Foundation
 * Notes being taken by brion at Wikimedia_Engineering/WMF_Tech_Days_2012/MediaWikiFoundation
 * Long table room: Profiling tutorial, by Asher
 * Slide Deck
 * MediaWiki Performance Profiling video

14:30 - Sessions continue / Training track


 * Big Room A
 * Remote working/timezones suck (Antoine)
 * Notes by Rob Lanphier, Wikimedia_Engineering/WMF_Tech_Days_2012/WorkingRemotely
 * Big Room B
 * Mobile first design (Brandon)
 * Notes: Wikimedia_Engineering/WMF_Tech_Days_2012/TechDays-Mobile by Jon and Tomasz
 * Big Room C
 * Tagging - how to measure if we are moving the meedle (Dario/Ori)
 * Conversation never started (?); no notes
 * Parsoid: Declined to take notes
 * Real-time analytics
 * Large Table Room
 * Puppet tutorial
 * Video
 * Security (secure coding and other stuff)
 * Slide deck, Video

15:30 - Department-level meetings / Sessions continue


 * Big Room A/B
 * 20% time/online code of conduct/dev privileges (Sumana)
 * Notes: Taken locally by Mark Holmquist: /Down with twenty percent/
 * Notes: Taken locally by Mark Holmquist: /Code of Conduct/
 * Big Room C
 * Test the XXXX out of your stuff (Antoine)
 * Notes: Wikimedia_Engineering/WMF_Tech_Days_2012/Testing
 * Table Room
 * Can WMF move the active editor needle? (Erik, Diederik)
 * Notes: Wikimedia_Engineering/WMF_Tech_Days_2012/MTN
 * How can we engage anons better? (Fabrice, EE team)

17:00 - Reconvene / report-back (session summaries)


 * Internationalization: talked about how people fail when i18n: there is a presentation and MW "i18n for developers" page Wikimedia_Engineering/WMF_Tech_Days_2012/i18n-best-practices-sept2012
 * MediaWiki Foundation: identified pains for 3rd party users, Debian/Fedora packaging, RFC on MW for the future of third-party wiki.
 * Agile meeting was good...
 * Testing: Wikimedia_Engineering/WMF_Tech_Days_2012/Testing

17:50 - room reconfiguration

18:00 - Dinner - @ The Box

19:00 - Drinks/Social event

September 12 agenda
TBD, but likely hackathon-style with less rigid agenda

On-site prep: 9am - 10am

Start: 10:00am

12:30 - Lunch

17:00 - Hackathon showcase

Dinner? Possible last min beer/pizza order if people want to stick around

General logistics to know

 * The place has two projectors. Assume VGA connectivity works.

Wishlist / parking lot

 * Process fun
 * 20% time / managing the CR backlog
 * Cross-functional meetings
 * Moving Mobile into MediaWiki core
 * Notifications
 * MediaWiki core vision: Scribunto, Parser, WikiData?…
 * Universal Language Selector: impact/rollout discussion
 * Design Toolkit rollout: style guide, etc.
 * Google Summer of Code mentors retrospective and information-sharing
 * QA / testing event planning
 * Bug Wrangler / Product meeting
 * Architecture review: Database sharding, memcached, API, ...
 * Anatomy of a feature from a UI/UX perspective: Universal Language Selector (Pau Giner)
 * Future vision of Wikimedia wikis - where do we want to be in 1 year/3 years and how do we get there?
 * Analytics/Kraken
 * revtagging/usertagging
 * Training
 * Mingle!
 * Performance: profiling using xhprof, query analysis, …
 * Security
 * Team sprints
 * Ops deployment sprint: EQIAD / West Coast caching DC