Thread:Talk:Wikimedia engineering 20% policy/Suggested replacement: LevelUp

This is a draft of my idea for replacing 20% time with a new program for WMF engineers. It's called LevelUp.


 * It's quarterly, not weekly
 * It permanently increases our community code review capacity
 * It grows you as a technical leader

Plan:

Starting in 2013, every engineer or sysadmin at WMF has a quarterly goal: either to get more domain knowledge on a particular repo/codebase and become a regular code reviewer on that codebase, or to coach a particular mentee to get +2 privileges on a repo. So, some WMFers coach other WMFers, and some coach volunteers. Sumana helps matchmake and find volunteers (including via programs like Google Summer of Code), and your manager checks in with you about your progress during your regular one-on-one or status meetings.

As part of this, Sumana is also creating a table of who knows the most about all the components of Wikimedia's codebase and infrastructure, including MediaWiki core, extensions, and our server architecture. She's going to highlight the extension update frequency, number of high-priority open bugs, and potential new maintainers (including recent committers) and mentors. That should be available for your use by November 1 2012.

You can learn by reviewing code and hacking with your mentor, and you can teach by metareviewing your mentee's code reviews, pair programming, and so on.

I predict that, at the end of 1 quarter of this, our code review backlog will be about the same as it is now (statistics). But after 2 quarters, it'll go down, because we'll have more confident reviewers and maintainers.

Opting out
If you prefer to opt out of this and simply spend 1 day a week doing design and code review for new extensions, fixing bugs that affect everyone, increasing test coverage, or something else that helps the whole community.