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
(Prep schedule is on the Etherpad.)

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

14:30 - Sessions continue / Training track

15:30 - Department-level meetings

17:00 - Reconvene / report-back

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: DB 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