Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2012/February

 Engineering metrics in February:
 * unique committers contributed code to MediaWiki.
 * About code commits were reviewed.
 * The total number of unreviewed commits went from 44 to.
 * About shell requests were processed.
 * developers got commit access, among which volunteers.
 * Wikimedia Labs now hosts projects,  instances and  users.

Major news in February include:
 * Swift deployment for thumbnails
 * 1.19 deployment to all Wikimedia sites except for most Wikipedia languages

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

Recent events

 * Pune hackathon (10–12 February 2012, Pune, India) — A few dozen participants came to this three-day developer outreach event cohosted with GNUnify. Participants focused on language support (i18n/l10n) and mobile applications.  Some new translations were created and the Wikimedia Mobile team received some improvements to the Android app for Wikipedia.


 * GLAMcamp DC (10–12 February 2012, Washington, D.C., USA)
 * The Wikipedia citation tool was developed as a web browser extension that allows users to obtain a citation from any online MARC library catalog, and in that specific language version of Wikipedia.
 * A mass upload script was written for importing the images and metadata of the Walters Art Museum. The results of the test run can be seen at common:Category:Media contributed by the Walters Art Museum. The full collection (~20,000 images) will be uploaded in March. Documentation of the process can be found at http://notes.wikimediadc.org/p/upload-project.

Upcoming events

 * Chennai Hackathon March 2012 (17 March 2012, Chennai, India) — WMF's Yuvi Panda and volunteer Srikanthlogic are hosting this one-day hackathon for experienced developers. Volunteers can work with the MediaWiki API and other Wikimedia technologies and show off their accomplishments.


 * Berlin hackathon (1-3 June 2012, Berlin, Germany) — Wikimedia Germany is hosting this three-day "inreach" hackathon for the Wikimedia technical community, including MediaWiki developers, Toolserver users, bot writers and maintainers, Gadget creators, and other Wikimedia technologists. The event will mostly involve focused sprints, bugbashing, and other hacking, with a few focused tutorials and trainings on Git, Lua, Gadgets changes, or other topics of interest.  Wikimedia Germany will also use this event to consult on and discuss the Wikidata structured data initiative.  Wikimedia developers will soon get more information on travel sponsorships.


 * Wikimania hackathon (10-11 July 2012, Washington, DC, USA) — Katie Filbert, Gregory Varnum, and Sumana Harihareswara have begun planning the hybrid inreach/outreach hackathon occurring just prior to Wikimania. Experienced Wikimania technologists will collaborate while interested new developers will be able to learn introductory MediaWiki development.  The organizers are deciding on themes and focus topics for the event, possibly including accessibility.

Job openings
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.


 * Developers and engineers:
 * Senior Software Engineer Front-end
 * Interaction Designer
 * Software Developer (Back-end, Data Analytics)
 * Software Developer (Rich Text Editing, Features)
 * Software Developer (Front-end)
 * Software Developer (Mobile)
 * Software Security Engineer
 * Operations Engineer (Labs)


 * Management & Product:
 * Technical Product Analyst


 * Requests for proposals:
 * Mobile QA — Help us set up testing and automation processes for all Wikimedia Mobile projects.
 * Lucene Search Operations Engineer — Help us maintain and improve our Search software stack and infrastructure.

Short news

 * David Schoonover joined the Platform engineering team as Systems Engineer for Data Analytics (announcement).
 * Jon Robson joined the Mobile engineering team as Software Developer for Mobile (announcement).
 * Terry Chay joined the Wikimedia Foundation as Director of Features Engineering (announcement).
 * Christian Aistleitner joined the Operations team as a contractor working on the XML dump infrastructure (announcement).

Site infrastructure

 * Data Centers —


 * Media Storage — February saw Swift deployed to production to serve thumbnail requests 3 weeks earlier than anticipated.  There were a few bugs that we fixed, but overall the deploy process went very smoothly.  Graphs of Swift's performance are in ganglia.  The next steps are doing some more work around documentation and maintenance procedures, then creating a mirror cluster in Eqiad.  Swift in Labs and original media in Swift are also on the road map.


 * HTTPS —

Testing environment

 * Wikimedia Labs —

Backups and data archives

 * Data Dumps — We now have a copy of all dumps on a secondary host in another data center.  We've been working with two organizations on full mirrors of the dumps, sorting out performance issues before they can go live.  Christian (QChris) has got the beginning of a rough test framework for the dumps working.  We've made contact with folks at the Internet Archive and we're working on scripts using the S3 api to push our historical dump archive to their servers.  The source code has been moved to our git repo, and we're in the middle of the transition to MW 1.19, checking that the dumps work correctly for migrated projects.

Other news

 * wikitech:Site issue February 2012
 * wikitech:Site issue February 2012

Mobile

 * Android Wikipedia App —

Over a million installs, with an updated version in beta now. Beta switches from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap for location displays, giving us better cross-platform compatibility. iOS version of the app continues to make progress towards beta.


 * WikipediaZero —


 * Wikipedia over SMS/USSD —


 * GPS Storage/Retrieval —


 * FeaturedFeeds —


 * Wiktionary app —

Fundraising support
Adding support for recurring globalcollect donations was the primary engineering focus in February, with work on this functionality carrying over into March. Several deployments were made to the payments cluster to better our form localization in several countries in Africa. A subset of those forms were used in a week-long banner and landing page test that also ran in February. A great deal of effort was expended in February in the name of building out the team by two more people; The search for new fundraising engineers is ongoing.

Offline

 * 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.