Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2011-11-29

Meta
Please check the November summaries at Wikimedia Platform Engineering

List of projects
Architecture of Open Source Applications book chapter Bug Triage Bugzilla application management Hackathons/events Commit Access Recruitment/encouragement Monthly report Communication support Engineering project documentation 1.18 deployment & release support Recruiting/hiring Code review meistering Dev community metrics SocialCoding4Good Training documentation Wikimedia blog maintenance
 * Mentor Summit
 * India
 * January SF
 * mentorship/office hours plan

Who's doing what
Sumana -  India hackathon followup & mentor summit followup,  commit access, recruitment/encouragement, code review meistering, help with training documentation, planning for January hackathon Guillaume - AOSA / training doc, Wikimedia blog maintenance, monthly report Mark H - bugzilla admin, code review, bug triage, 1.18 release, patch review Rob - Hiring, 1.18 release, code review Siebrand - not on call, India hackathon Claudia - Bugzilla database

Architecture of Open Source Applications book chapter
Submitted to the editors, who found it good enough to send it to tech reviewers now on hold until we get the second round of feedback

Bug Triage
Maybe doing Fundraising triage this week? Checking with Arthur - Sumana next week

Bugzilla (application) management
Urgent! We had to disable new account creation! Mark reenabled new account creation, talked with Rob H & Ariel about what to do Mark is looking at patches for using editbug permission to stop "CC" vandalism Velocity checks: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=704753 Tools to revert changes in bugs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=363346 Does the patch fix it so it's tied to editbugs permission? patch needs to be modified to .... patch doesn't let you remove people from cc, but it doesn't stop you from adding random people as cc's. So Mark wants to add that functionality. Mark to test that today.

Hackathons/Events
All currently listed at MediaWiki developer meetings except FOSDEM
 * 2012-02-04: FOSDEM 2012, Brussels, Belgium
 * Possible talks by WMF people
 * give me more info about this; who?
 * 2012-02-11: GNUnify, Pune, India
 * MediaWiki hackathon/workshop
 * Talks by WMF people (Siebrand + ???)
 * 2012-04-??: Berlin hackathon (?), Berlin, Germany
 * 2012-07-12: Wikimania hackathon, Washington D.C., USA

Mentor Summit
Sumana still needs to finish followup, aim to do that today

India
Mumbai hackathon: Sumana needs to write wikitech-l post, do more followup WikiConference 2011 Mumbai:

Meet the developers forum (45 mins).

Language support teams (30 min, GerardM)

Language Support in Wikipedia (30 min. Siebrand)

Translation Sprint (1 hour, Siebrand - hampered by not having wireless network up yet, so only a demo by the presenter)

Pune: translation sprint of 3 hours done by localisation team. 40 people attended, and many were happy to be able to type in their naive language for the first time (!). This slowed us down, but hey, we have to start somewhere. Also did a 2.5 hour introduction of Mediawiki hacking introduction for about 20 people (Siebrand, Santhosh, Niklas). Used the "how to become a MediaWiki hacker" page. May have also used the /Workshop subpage. Ill prepared, but we had pre-installed 1.19-svn, so everyone did at least an install of MediaWiki trunk, and used extension distributor. We also introduced Subversion, bugzilla and the mediawiki.org documentation. It was pretty bad IMO that the architecture documentation started with "Some or all of the information on this page is inconsistent, irrelevant or confusing."(!) MediaWiki architecture document/text
 * Err, what?

(caching problem?) Guillaume had replaced old version of the architecture document page with the new one.
 * Sumana to ask Siebrand about lessons learned

January in SF
Sumana created January 2012 SF Hackathon and needs to talk to pariSoma, start doing outreach/publicity Sumana - check on note to engineering about what to do to prepare -- resend?
 * Re-sent.

Commit Access
continuing

Recruitment/encouragement
continuing -- documentation! & patch Guillaume to respond to documenters if asked, or reach out next week - template magic?

Monthly report
Guillaume worked on this last week and is now sprinting to get it out this week: Wikimedia engineering report/2011/November
 * Everyone -- update & check your portions of the report! If you have information about events, or know people who could, help!  review session with eng directors tomorrow (Wed)

Communication support
minor stuffy stuff, let's move along

Engineering project documentation
being updated as Guillaume writes the monthly report

1.18 deployment & release support
1.18.0 released! We are getting some testing, reports of broken things

Sam filed a bug

Mark to keep an eye out

YAY. YAY! Guillaume writing blog post (nope) Guillaume twitted the MediaWiki 1.18 page because we needed something to tweet fast. It would be good to have a "MediaWiki release howto" for future releases, to which Guillaume would be happy to add a "Public communications" section. (including "write a blog post for WMF blog")
 * Release checklist

Recruiting/hiring
(update from RobLa) RobLa to write blog post in "What is Platform Eng?" series

Code review meistering
This is the big problem. Pay attention to code review calendar (20%) & ping people if it looks like they might not be doing it at their hours? & for people who haven't given specific dates, ask what their hours are that day Once we get to git, & merging into trunk is a privilege, we may have a whole different set of metrics. 1.19 Branch scheduled?

will try to get much closer to 0 on backlog before branching, to avoid backporting. for example, a bug for the 1.18 release introduced in February!

* mentorship/office hours plan
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Development_process_improvement/20%25_policy -- we're getting more signups Encouraging exchange reviews by people who write extensions

Dev community metrics
on hold - writing spec

SocialCoding4Good
on hold, awaiting SC4G ok

Training documentation
Guillaume started to go through the raw materials, will resume work on this next week

Wikimedia blog maintenance
Not much happened this week on this; work will resume next week Guillaume created 2 RT tickets, needs someone to do SVN update to update skin, & setting up prototype in labs can wait