User:CFloyd (WMF)/Reading Services Coordination

Purpose of this document
This document will serve as a stage for initial planning and information gathering for an initiative to improve our services processes in the Reading vertical.

Goal
To provide support and processes that enable product teams within the Reading vertical to better plan and develop new features that require backend services.

Desired Outcomes

 * Reduce uncertainty of feature planning that involves services
 * Improve productivity of engineers by streamlining services planning and development
 * Increase collaboration of platform teams within Reading by working together on shared services
 * Establish collaborative relationships with other teams and verticals that develop and maintain services

Roles and Responsibilities
To accomplish these goals, it is proposed to create a new role within the Reading vertical which will have the following responsibilities:
 * Assist PMs in productizing existing and new services developed within the WMF and community
 * Coordinate and communicate service requirements of the product in the Reading vertical with external teams
 * Gather service needs for upcoming features from Reading PMs
 * Align Reading product teams on shipping of common service backed features
 * Maintain a 6-9 month road map for service dependent Reading features
 * Coordinate development and deployment schedules of services and product features among teams
 * Identify and manage development dependencies of service and product teams
 * Establish a Point-of-Contact for each team involved in the development each service
 * Maintain a Phabricator project and board for tracking schedules and dependencies

Feed Services APIs
Description

Create and deploy APIs and services to support the Explore Feed for the iOS and Android Apps
 * 1) Deploy separate endpoints for random, trending, picture of the day, featured article, and in the news
 * 2) Create an aggregated endpoint
 * 3) Create an infrastructure that allows us to easily add new service endpoints for the feed

Maps and Geo Services API
Description

Enhance the existing search APIs to allow:
 * 1) Specifying a keyword search term
 * 2) Increasing the search radius

Trending Edits API
Description

Develop and deploy a service that will provide a list of trending articles
 * 1) Ingest the RCS or other stream
 * 2) Provide a means to persist and aggregate the edit information for calculations
 * 3) Calculate trending articles based on an algorithm that analyzes number/velocity of edits
 * 4) Provide the list in order of most to least trending
 * 5) Provide the list in chronological order of most recently to least recently became trending

Push Notifications
Description

Create and deploy a backend infrastructure that can:
 * 1) Send push notifications to Android, iOS, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
 * 2) Can consume an arbitrary stream or end point to get data
 * 3) Can perform arbitrary analysis of consumed data to determining whether a push is required and for what devices
 * 4) Can persist a list of UDIDs representing devices/browsers, subscription types, dates, and some metadata
 * 5) SLA of 10 minutes (not real time)

Trending Push Notifications
Description

Send push notifications to devices and browsers when an article becomes a "large" trend

Wikidata Enrichment APIs
Description

Ingest Wikidata information to enrich the querying ability of search APIs

Key Value Store
Description

A generic key-value store for arbitrary user data

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T128602

Consolidation of CSS and JS transforms for article display
Description

Move as much styling code and JS into the MCS as possibly in order to unify the styling code for the Apps

Improve Read More Service
Description

Ingest Wikidata information to enrich the querying ability of search APIs

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T137992

Thumb API
Description

Create an API to return thumbnails based on defined size parameters

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T66214

MCS Page View enhancement
Description

Add page view data to both the article response and the trending API response to give better context to the articles to enable UI like:

http://top.hatnote.com

On This Day API

Description

Add an API for querying OTD and full day results. This will enable platforms to display timeline cards.

Example local implementation:

https://github.com/wikimedia/wikipedia-ios/pull/701

MCS HTML enhancement
Description

To support faster rendering in Webviews, return MCS responses as HTML (instead of JSON)

Administrative

 * Define responsibilities for my work in establishing a services coordination process
 * Create a Wiki to track progress and plans during initial stages
 * Work with Adam to gather organization information and contacts
 * Set up a standing meeting with Bernd to coordinate upcoming features with current MCS work
 * Schedule meeting with Toby/Adam to discus current plans
 * Meet with Max (TPG) to review current notes and plans to get ideas on how to orchestrate this work
 * Review existing Q1 plans of Reading, Discover, Services, and Analytics
 * Review planned feature releases for all Reading platforms
 * Understand and document the relationship between MediaWiki, Restbase Services and the Mobile Content Service
 * Determine the process for planning services adoption for Mobile Web / Web (Specifically codify that the testing grounds will be apps and the Wb will go through longer trials)
 * Create 6-9 Month Road Map of all Reading Services
 * Work with TPG to establish a process for working with teams to develop and ship cross vertical features
 * Create a Phabricator tag and board to track tasks across all dependencies and platforms
 * Create documentation for planning a feature with service requirements

iOS Team Impacts

 * 1) Current time being spent on coordination is about 10-15 hours/week

Progress Reports
June 20 - June 30 July 8 July 11 July 18 Aug 3
 * Information Gathering
 * Worked with Josh to coordinate new Geodata service changes with Discovery - enhancements are deployed
 * Coordinated beginning of work on new Trending Edits Service
 * Created this wiki to document planning process
 * Scheduled standing meeting with Bernd
 * Added new services to track… improved read more, consolidation of article styling code, thumbnail API, On this day, and HTML
 * Scheduled meeting with Max to review planning