Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2012/March

 Engineering metrics in March:
 * 98 unique committers contributed code to MediaWiki.
 * About code commits were reviewed.
 * The total number of unreviewed commits went from 31 to.
 * About 34 shell requests were processed.
 * developers got commit access, among which volunteers.
 * Wikimedia Labs now hosts projects,  instances and  users.

Major news in March include:
 * The completion of the [//blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/09/transfer-of-wikipedia-sites-from-godaddy-complete/ move of all our domain names from registrar GoDaddy];
 * The [//blog.wikimedia.org/2012/02/15/wikimedia-engineering-moving-from-subversion-to-git/ move from Subversion to git] as our primary code versioning system;
 * The kick-off of [//blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/16/project-ideas-students-and-mentors-wanted-gsoc-2012/ Wikimedia's participation to Google Summer of Code 2012];
 * The kick-off of [//blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/16/project-ideas-students-and-mentors-wanted-gsoc-2012/ Wikimedia's participation to Google Summer of Code 2012];

Hover your mouse over the green question marks to see the description of a particular project.

Recent events

 * Chennai Hackathon March 2012 (17 March 2012, Chennai, India) —

Upcoming events

 * Berlin hackathon (1–3 June 2012, Berlin, Germany) —


 * Wikimania hackathon (10–11 July 2012, Washington, D.C., USA) —

Work with us
Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We have a lot of hiring coming up, and we really love talking to active community members about these roles.


 * Lucene Search Operations Engineer (RFP)
 * Mobile Quality assurance (RFP)
 * Senior Software Frontend Engineer
 * Software Developer Backend
 * Software Developer Frontend
 * Software Developer Mobile
 * Software Security Engineer
 * Technical Product Analyst
 * Interaction Designer

Site infrastructure

 * Ashburn data center —


 * Tampa data center —


 * Media Storage — After addressing earlier issues with the Swift deployment, Ben Hartshorne re-deployed it and added another node to the cluster, bring a total of 5 new Swift nodes to be the thumbnails object store at Tampa.

Testing environment

 * Wikimedia Labs —

Backups and data archives

 * Data Dumps — We sorted out the network issues to our mirror sites on our end by replacing a switch, set up a new host told hold a copy of all uploaded media for copying to oour mirror sites, and and the first copy of this media to an external mirror is now underway.  Mirror sites will also be able to pick up a list of dump files to copy (the last 1, 2 or 5 good dumps) in a few different formats, produced by a new script.  The first copy of recent dumps to a gluster share available to labs users is available but already out of date; one process is too slow, so a script is being tested that will dispatch copy requests to several processes running at once.  Christian is working on PHPUnit tests now for the maintenance scripts used for the dumps.  We've improved our process for deployment of new versions of the xml dump scripts so that new code can be rolled out more often.

Other news

 * Performance engineer Asher Feldman published an [//blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/15/measuring-site-performance-at-the-wikimedia-foundation/ article explaining how site performance is measured] at the Wikimedia Foundation.
 * Operations engineer Ryan Lane, who is leading the Wikimedia Labs project, was [//blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/20/a-profile-in-free-collaboration/ featured on the Wikimedia Blog] this month.

Offline Projects

 * Kiwix UX initiative —

Future
The engineering management team continues to update the Software deployments page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the engineering roadmap, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts. In March, a particular focus of the engineering management team was also the annual goal and budgeting process.