Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2012-02-28

TLDR meeting, 28 Feb 2012

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

List of projects

 * Code review meistering
 * 1.19 stuff: deployment & release support
 * 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: 1.19 deployment testing Mark: 1.19 Deployment support, bug triage Guillaume: communications support, monthly report, blog maintenance RobLa: Recruiting/hiring, 1.19 deployment Sumana: Commit access, volunteer recruiting and encouragement (including GSoC and UCOSP), hackathons and events/conferences in general, engineering project documentation (git)
 * making topics for next week’s SF visit (1.20 planning etc.)
 * experimenting with labs
 * learning git/gerrit

Code review meistering
Mark coordinating with RobLa.

We went back up to about 258 unreviewed revisions per https://toolserver.org/~robla/crstats/

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
RobLa: delays, or will we deploy to en.wp and all the Wikipedias this week? YES (the latter!)

http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/119triage

Dutch & Polish Wikipedia seem fine! Mark talked to Siebrand, who found a small JS problem in Dutch WP. Krinkle looking at it.
 * TODO: Mark to add volunteer names to the spreadsheet.

We’re thinking of doing a point deploy from trunk in early Mark, opportunistically. 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&list_id=95048

Chris, Mark, Guillaume:

Chris: on top of testing effort Guillaume: ongoing maintenance & updating of the translations of the maintenance banners, landing pages, etc.

Communicating with Gadgets creators?
 * TODO: Mark to add some people’s contact info to volunteer spreadsheet

SWIFT deployment support
Currently: deployment went well; only doing thumbnails, not originals. Origs deployment at some point to occur. There are some broken imgs that we can clear up, mostly, by purging cache. They seem to be dated from around Feb 2, or before. Ben is planning to accelerate finding and fixing those.

FileBackend/SwiftMedia: Aaron’s software is all written & polished.

Bug Triage
1.19 is all the week since *pedias are being done now.
 * TODO: Mark to plan Friday bug triage.

Individual developer assignment work (what bugs are assigned to whom)
Continuing to do this in 20% standups - One fixme from code Roan committed in 1.19, Krinkle is trying to come up with a solution. 22 FIXMEs post-1.19. Mark is nagging them.

Bugzilla application management
Asked Rusty Burchfield (gicode) to get something going with git integration -- I talked to Rusty. He doesn't have time right now, but maybe he will later. In the meantime, I think I can figure out a way to create local branches from patches and, once Gerrit is ready, push those branches. Mark thinks this is trivial to do. Rob: This is a nice-to-have. Git makes this straightforward to do manually. Let’s not assign this to someone.
 * TODO: Sumana to ask Rusty to do this by mid-March if possible

Wikimedia blog maintenance
Guillaume created RT tickets last week, RobH processed one (upgrading WordPress code & 3rd-party plugins). Recent theme & WMBlog plugin improvements still awaiting deployment. Guillaume also started to rewrite the theme’s layout so it can be centered (which isn’t trivial, because the theme was originally based on the very MediaWiki-specific Vector layout. Made good progress last week, trying to finish this this week if time (besides monthly report & travel), otherwise next week (if I can get stuff done between meetings).

Training documentation
Sumana wrote/edited a bunch of Git docs, especially https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Workflow and has been running tutorials using that as a reference.

We need to improve our installation instructions for MediaWiki.

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

TL;DR and Platform in good shape, Guillaume is talking to the engineering directors to get the info for the other groups.

Communications support
 Guillaume had a meeting with the extended Communications team last week; discussion to be continued in SF (about communications, the blog, processes; etc.)

Engineering project documentation
Guillaume:
 * perennial project page maintenance

Sumana: updated https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Conversion and a few other projects, told volunteers about https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Project_documentation_howto

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; added them to engineering calendar, including Calls for Participation ending in about 2 weeks. Submitted OSB proposal http://opensourcebridge.org/proposals/758 and helped connect recruiter Karen Chelini with possible conferences to sponsor.

Commit Access
Behind due to deployments & Git migration; scheduled an extra-long meeting for next 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. Rob says: go ahead and recruit skilled reviewers to review patches.
 * Talked to mediawiki-l about the issue of spam and vandalism in MediaWiki installations, updated docs to recommend Extension:QuestyCaptcha
 * Marked patches that need review. Currently above 130 for MediaWiki core, 60 for extensions WMF deploys.

GSoC
Sumana spending lots of time encouraging GSoC participants in IRC and mailing lists. Last week, encouraged about 100 women at Wellesley to apply. Need to start writing org application this week!


 * TODO: Sumana to provide template for emailing past professors, students, etc. -- need to do this this week!

UCOSP
Basically progressing fine

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

Misc

 * TL;DR team plan for March team visit - includes some strategy and budget thinking, Wikimania submissions sprint, Chris/Mark info transfer, and thinking about effectiveness in communications.


 * Sumana out of office Wed. afternoon while heading to SF, in SF Feb 29-March 10


 * Guillaume in SF from March 1st to March 14th. On vacation from March 15th to March 23rd.


 * Rob out-of-office week of Mar 26