Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2012-03-06

TLDR meeting, 6 March 2012

Attending: Guillaume, Mark, Sumana, Chris McMahon, RobLa

List of projects

 * Code review meistering
 * 1.19 stuff: deployment & release support
 * Git and Gerrit migration
 * SWIFT deployment support
 * Bug Triage
 * Individual developer assignment work (what bugs are assigned to whom)
 * Bugzilla application management
 * Wikimedia blog maintenance
 * Training documentation
 * Monthly report
 * Communications support
 * Engineering project documentation
 * Recruiting/hiring
 * Hackathons/events (January SF, Pune, Berlin, Wikimania)
 * Conferences in general
 * Commit Access
 * Recruitment/encouragement
 * GSOC
 * UCOSP
 * Dev community metrics

Who's doing what (this week)
Chris: learning Git, Gerrit, installation, and who at WMF needs testing services Mark: 1.19 Deployment support, bug triage Guillaume: communications support, monthly report, blog maintenance, meetings meetings meetings RobLa: Recruiting/hiring, 1.19 deployment followup, Git migration, Budget, meetings meetings meetings Sumana: Commit access, volunteer recruiting and encouragement (including GSoC and UCOSP), hackathons and events/conferences in general, engineering project documentation (git)

Code review meistering
Mark coordinating with RobLa.

Slush is still in effect -- we want people to arrange reviewers before they push anything that’s not a little bugfix. Reviewers, please revert anything that isn’t.

1.19 stuff: deployment & release support
Found some new volunteers for testing and added them and previous ones to the spreadsheet.

We’re thinking of doing a point deploy from trunk in early March, opportunistically.
 * We should look over bugs on the 1.19.0 milestone. Mark talked with developers about these last Friday in Triage. There are ~30 bugs.  Maybe a beta?

Start the 1.20 series with 1.20 wmf1? how to decouple deployments from releases?

Bugs: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?resolution=---&target_milestone=1.19wmf%20deployment

RobLa says: Sam will put out a beta release very soon.
 * TODO: RobLa, look through a list of bugs to fix before 1.19 release, see what to cull.

Communicating with Gadgets creators? Mark is slowly gathering gadget authors... It would be nice if someone started on a MW.o gadget portal. RobLa: Let's coopt the API mailing list! Guillaume: need a space to point people to when we do outreach. Could be simple. Maybe rename the Timo work
 * TODO: Mark to note names of interested folks

Git and Gerrit migration
Sumana taking over project management for this (what bugs are blockers, what needs doing when, docs and training)

We should realllllly try to make the 21 March date.

We have the opportunity to do more training. Set expectations: March-April: more training, productivity hit

SWIFT deployment support
A Village Pump said that there were some thumbnail issues. Commons perhaps.
 * TODO - RobLa to look this up and coordinate with Mark

Bug Triage
Mark: to look at the 1.19-related list and find volunteers to work on stuff.

Individual developer assignment work (what bugs are assigned to whom)
Goal for Mark: by end of Tues, set up 6 of those meetings.

Bugzilla application management
(Sumana to talk to Rusty) Mark needs to talk to CT about updating BZ templates for entering bugs (on mobile issues) for Tomasz. Maybe get access. Eventually, maybe we should actually design it! with a theme like KDE's Bugzilla

Wikimedia blog maintenance
good news: RobH upgraded WordPress core & 3rd party extensions, and Daniel Z. deployed Guillaume's improvements and new features in the theme & WMBlog plugin

The rest (skin rewrite) is on hold for now; not time-critical, and Guillaume is using his time in SF for work that requires more interaction; will be resumed next week (if time), but more probably in early April (after vacation, and March report)

More exciting stuff probably coming up this year; will know more after talking to Jay.

Training documentation
We need to improve our installation instructions for MediaWiki. explain dependencies, order, why apt-get MW isn't a good idea, etc. (there's a nice doc about installing 1.16)
 * TODO: Chris says he will actually do this!

Monthly report
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2012/February

Almost ready, will hopefully be published tomorrow

Guillaume is also going to talk to Tomasz / Phil and Terry to try and set up good reporting practices; hopefully this will make it easier to write the report in the future, starting in March

Communications support
Guillaume having meetings with the Social Media team, the communications team, etc.

Engineering project documentation
Guillaume:
 * updating project pages while putting together the monthly report
 * meeting with Terry about project documentation and features communication
 * meeting with Tomasz & Phil about mobile engineering project documentation
 * meeting with Sumana & Rob about strategy

Recruiting/hiring
Rob? (private)

fairly new opening: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/RFP/Lucene_Search_Operations_Engineer

Hackathons/events (January SF, Pune, Berlin, Wikimania)
Sumana followed up on Pune event, needs to work on other followup & planning; this week will have call re Berlin planning

Conferences in general
Sumana continuing to reach out and help arrange talks at upcoming events.

Commit Access
Extra-long meeting for this week to discuss how to deal with project ownership additions, changes, and removals in the new Git/Gerrit future

Recruitment/encouragement
Sumana continuing to do this.

GSoC
Writing org application.

UCOSP
Basically progressing fine

Dev community metrics
On hold, waiting for Claudia to do some Bugzilla-related stuff in March

Misc

 * Rob out-of-office week of Mar 26
 * Guillaume: vacation / travel March 15th-25th

Talking about merging labsconsole & wikitech, and centralizing engineering project documentation -- later today in TL;DR strategy meeting