Wikimedia Search Team/Meeting minutes/2015-05-26

Checkins

 * James
 * Worked on API docs
 * Wrote a simple WDQS graph explorer. Not deployed yet. Stas will help James with that.
 * Will continue with API docs. Goal is to make it as quick and painless as possible for new devs
 * Stas
 * Getting a few results from beta query service. Some bug reports. Some performance concerns.
 * Will work on bugs and performance issues, and will streamline its deployment process
 * Nik
 * Worked on query_string replacement. Wants to integrate with Cirrus and use on real log data.
 * Should break into more granular tasks
 * Oliver
 * Priority has been bug fixes.
 * Dashboard is showing live data, which revealed several problems.
 * Still some brittleness when tables are scrubbed. Should be fixed at some point.
 * Clearing out legal stuff, some of which probably should have been handled by reading.
 * 40-point task is almost done, which will allow full-time work on S&D
 * Reviewing tech tasks from job candidates (45 plausible in the pipeline)
 * Blocked on some steps due to budget, but moving good candidates along where possible
 * Still slowed by analytics hardware limitations
 * There is twice as much non-production work as CPU capacity for it
 * Since new hardware is 3+ months away, Tomasz will get involved in trying to find a solution
 * KS to set up further meetings
 * Max
 * Mostly preparing to demo maps during hackathon
 * Heard from Yuri that it went well, with lots of interest (including Lila)
 * Looking to revise hardware request to bare minimum to try to fit budget
 * Maps are “not dead yet”, so will keep working on them.
 * Tomasz
 * Catching up on inbox; connecting w/Wes to understand budget.

Workboard Walkthrough
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/search-team/
 * Not necessary yet; will probably become part of the agenda later

Scrum of Scrums

 * Are we blocked?
 * Nothing
 * Are we blocking?
 * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/blocked-on-search/

Info/To Discuss

 * From last week
 * Should James learn more about metrics/measurement?
 * "No"
 * There are three different aspects to this problem:
 * Figuring out what we should measure to evaluate our success. -> Erik
 * Implementing event logging to measure those things. -> Engineering
 * Creating dashboards and visualisations of that data. -> Oliver
 * Who can help Stas with Java stuff?
 * We don’t have an answer for this - that is really something we need to work on
 * Wes should have answers within a week or so
 * Proposal to keep feature-specific phabricator projects around
 * No objections, so will proceed
 * Oliver proposes that all logging should go to the analytics cluster
 * Examples: Elastic, WDQS.
 * Need to spread the knowledge of how to do it (Oliver will coach Stas)

FYI

 * Wikimania (July 15-19)
 * (need to insert relevant team page here)
 * Some folks will attend the Open Air conf next Thursday (SF)