Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2011-11-01

List of projects
AOSA Bug Triage Bugzilla management Hackathons Commit Access Recruitment/encouragement Monthly report Communication support 1.18 deployment & release support Recruiting/hiring Code review meistering Mentor Summit Metrics SocialCoding4Good
 * NOLA
 * India
 * mentorship/office hours plan

Who's doing what
Sumana - hackathon recruiting & followup, commit access, volunteer recruitment &  encouragement, recruiting/hiring, mentorship/office hours plan, mentor summit, AOSA chapter, metrics, SocialCoding4Good Guillaume - AOSA chapter, Monthly report, Communication support, Engineering project documentation Mark H - 1.18 Tarball, Bugzilla Monitoring, Bug triages -- 1.18 Triage (Friday) Rob - Recruiting/hiring, 1.18 release support, AOSA review Siebrand - India hackathon / l10n / twn

AOSA book
The community & editors have provided feedback ( MediaWiki architecture document/text ) Guillaume addressed most of the community feedback, and added FIXMEs to reflect the editor's feedback. Sumana offered to help with the remaining FIXMEs by asking people specific questions about the editor's FIXMEs, and asking people with graphic skills to make pretty diagrams. The editor got back to us, saying the word limit wasn't a hard limit and we could go over if we had interesting stuff to say. So we're mostly good. Guillaume may also try to reach out to Magnus Manske & Lee Daniel Crocker to see if they'd accept a quick interview by phone or e-mail to answer a few architect-y questions from the early days. New deadline: Friday next week (November 11th)

Monthly report
Guillaume completed most of the write-up last week, and is doing some polishing this week. Going to be sent to the engineering alias later today, and will be reviewed in collaborative session with engineering management on Wednesday; publication expected on Thursday The report is at Wikimedia engineering report/2011/October ; please review the sections relevant to your work; if you want to edit a status update, it might be easier to do it from Wikimedia Platform Engineering

Communications support
Guillaume reviewed some blog posts staff photos: at the end of the week, if time after the project pages / index work

Engineering project documentation
After discussing with Rob, Guillaume split up the draft project index and integrated the content into Wikimedia Platform Engineering and the newly created, still draft-y Wikimedia Features engineering. Guillaume also did a lot of templatey, behind-the-scenes magic to make this work. Feedback is welcome. Guillaume will continue to work on this this week, and also clean up the main WMF projects portal (with links to the engineering reports, the quarterly categories, and the team hubs) WMF_Projects "something magical" is on the horizon it'll be more pointers to teams
 * Mark, Siebrand, Sumana & Rob to give Guillaume feedback

1.18 deployment support & release support
Switching to 1.18 tarball focus. Hope to push out alpha tarball with Reedy's help today and beta next week. Sam returns to UK tomorrow night, might be online Wednesday current blocker: ops issues. RobLa trying to kill blockers. https://rt.wikimedia.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=1839
 * Mark to stay on top of RT ticket #1839

Bug Triage
Need to list up the bugs that were addressed. Planning to write a very brief report today about last week's mobile triage.
 * Mark to write report
 * Mark needs to prepare for Friday's 1.18 bug triage (may not happen)

Code review meistering
Patch review in Bugzilla, aiming to respond to the 40 latest patches that have come in (the past 8 weeks' worth) Pinging FIXMEs, touching base with several people. Need to fix associated users/committers (mkroetzsch == Clausekwis) -- may be a lot people have changed their wiki usernames; Mark needs to update that or figure out how they can update. Needs to happen eventually. Not super urgent

code review -- IRC office hours / mentoring
to improve our CR backlog situation, Rob is starting to push on other engineers to make sure they make time for the 20% stuff http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Development_process_improvement/20%25_policy We have a few people who have signed up for 20% time only a few people have done it they haven't really signed up fro a single day, which is important from a mgmt perspective Rob trying to make it rewarding, in the service of getting it done. How do we make code review feel useful, well-structured, rewarding? Rob wants to ensure there's usually obvious bugs for people to work on, code review to work on, & people feel they are getting recognition (if they want that). Ensure right incentives are there. Rob requests suggestions to be sent to him, may ask one of us to serve as a sounding board. Localisation team has formally committed to doing this in their planning. Probaly not the full 20%, but at least 10-15%. See https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/internationalization/cards/158

NOLA hackathon
yay blog post!
 * Sumana needs to do followup

Bugzilla management
Need to get Bugzilla puppetized -- that will make it possible to add extensions Not a high priority. Need to get directions from ops -- Rob says this will be ops's responsibility Feedback tool was broken in IE6. Mark wants to keep track of IE6 stuff better. RobLa says it's IE9. Bug - IE 6 & 7? 2 different bugs? maybe same issue? Re highest & high priority bugs: not much work on reprioritizing that recently, because of concentrating on 1.18.

India hackathon
Selection of first batch of registrants has been made by Sumana and Siebrand. Siebrand will send out invitations today, as well as disappoint those that are not invited.

Last WMF meeting had no one showed up yesterday; sent Alolita voice mail on mobile as well as mail, no response. Building burnt down!?

RobLa mentions Rachel Farrand, tech admin. RobLa suggests Siebrand consider asking her for scheduling & wrangling help

Commit access & volunteer recruitment / encouragement
continuing processes are continuing on Friday, Sumana sent a note to wikitech-l to close up a thread started in early Oct. about making it easier for devs to get commit access

Localisation / translatewiki.net
Wrote documentation for translators on Meta Translation/Introduction. Terms of use are up for translation. Monthly report, too? Guillaume: talk this through quickly after this meeting? sure Dang. Is MediaWiki.org... We could of course enable the extension there, too... Localisation team has ended its sprint 1 and the development showcase is available on Commons: (thanks to Brion for converting it from the proprietary WebEx format). November 5 the Wikimedia Conference Netherlands is held in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Siebrand is having a talk "Language support in MediaWiki" (try out for India conference) and Timo and Roan have a talk on Resource Loader 2.
 * Sumana to send a note about this to developers' list -- also showcase video
 * Siebrand to talk with Guillaume about opening up reports for translation

Recruiting / hiring
Rob's blog post on analytics is out: 2011/10/31/data-analytics-at-wikimedia-foundation/ Guillaume has prepared a tweet to be sent out later today on twitter, facebook & identica Would it be a good idea to do some communication about WMDE hiring for WikiData, too? (or possibly already done) Job description is now posted for security engineer Job openings/Software Security Engineer
 * Sumana to consider or delegate that
 * Sumana to look at The Email from QA candidate

Metrics

 * on hold
 * Sumana to look at The Email Claudia sent; about requirements

Misc
Thanksgiving plans coming up, will probably take Americans out of commission for the last week of November https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vacation_and_time_off_policy#Paid_holidays