Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/October

Major news in October include:
 * the removal of support for SSL 3.0 on Wikimedia sites to protect users against the "POODLE" vulnerability;
 * the release of the first native “Nearby” functionality in the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps;
 * the launch of the Structured Data project, an initiative to augment Wikimedia Commons using the technology developed for Wikidata.

Engineering metrics in October:
 * 150 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * About 27 shell requests were processed.

Upcoming events
There are many opportunities for you to get involved and contribute to MediaWiki and technical activities to improve Wikimedia sites, both for coders and contributors with other talents.

For a more complete and up-to-date list, check out the Project:Calendar.

Work with us
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.

* Senior Software Engineer - Services
 * Software Engineer - Maps & Geo - Mobile
 * Software Engineer - Mobile - iOS
 * Release Engineer
 * Technical Writer
 * Full Stack Developer - Analytics
 * Research Analyst
 * Agile Coach/ScrumMaster - Team Practices Group
 * Senior Technical Product Manager
 * Community Liaison
 * Community Liaison (PT Contract)
 * Operations Security Engineer
 * UX Senior Designer
 * UX Senior Design Researcher
 * UX Visual Design Fellowship
 * Mobile Partnerships Regional Manager

Announcements

 * Marcel Ruiz Forns joined the Analytics Development team (announcement).
 * Guillaume Paumier joined the Product and Strategy team as Senior Analyst (announcement).
 * Bartosz Dziewoński joined Wikimedia as a Features Contractor (announcement).
 * Moriel Schottlender converted to full time staff member status as a Software Engineer in Features Engineering (announcement).
 * Marielle Volz joined the Wikimedia Foundation as a Software Engineer for the Editing team (announcement).

Technical Operations
Dallas data center
 * In October we completed the initial stage of our data center deployment in Dallas; finishing the setup of essential infrastructure, and making sure all essential project data is being replicated and/or backed up in Dallas. The Ops team is now moving towards the next phase; making codfw capable of serving the wikis independently of eqiad, ideally using HHVM.

Tampa data center
 * On the first day of October we shutdown nearly all remaining servers in Tampa, allowing some room to resolve unexpected problems should they occur. On October 6, we started removing all equipment from their racks, and shipped equipment with remaining value to Dallas. By October 12, we had vacated the facility completely, marking the end of 10+ years of Wikipedia's home in Tampa.

Labs metrics in October: Tool metrics:
 * Number of projects: 145
 * Number of instances: 413
 * Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 1,992,192
 * Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 20,395
 * Number of virtual CPUs in use: 975
 * Number of users: 4,109
 * Number of tools: 947
 * Number of tool maintainers: 550

 Wikimedia Labs
 * Labs suffered a brief, partial outage on October 7 due to a presumed out-of-memory failure on a virtualization node. Everything was back up and running after about 30 minutes; Andrew rebalanced instance load to forestall similar such failures.
 * New hardware has been ordered to expand Labs VM capacity. With luck this will be in place within the next month or so.
 * Marc redesigned the default base image for labs instances. /var/log is now in its own partition, and we support some limited partition resizing.
 * Yuvi has made a good start on setting up instance state monitoring.
 * Marc added an Ubuntu Trusty bastion and exec node to Tool Labs. Some work is still in progress here due to package renames and dependency changes.
 * Marc wrote many pages of operator documentation for Tool Labs.

Front-end
Front-end libraries standardization
 * In October, the Front-End Standards Group continued their work to extend and adopt the OOjs UI library. This included the finalisation of the initial version of the MediaWiki theme in collaboration with the Design team, which can be explored in the online demo ; this will be deployed into MediaWiki's use of OOUI in the next few weeks. The library now has a parallel, PHP language port. This will allow pages to be created server-side and later as a progressive enhancement made rich for JavaScript-supporting clients. This PHP port will be made available inside MediaWiki soon, and will be used to provide the framework for the future skin architecture. The plan is to demonstrate it in rebuilding a small number of the core interfaces into OOUI by the end of the calendar year. Other improvements to the library include support for toolbar menus to only show a few items initially with option to expand later, and showing keyboard shortcuts, expansion of the developer documentation, and fixing a number of bugs. Two new widgets were created – a widget for a button that's also an input, and a widget for a progress bar, which will be used as part of the work to convert the new PDF generation system to use the OOjs UI framework.

Kiwix
The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH.


 * We released a minor version (1.91) of Kiwix for Android fixing a few annoying issues. Preparation to welcome Google Code-in junior developers has started.

Wikidata
The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland.


 * In October the Wikidata team focused on performance, bugfixing and planning for structured data support for multimedia files. This included a week-long workshop with volunteers and the WMF multimedia team in Berlin. They made progress on statements on properties, simple queries and usage tracking and rolled out first partial changes to the user interface that are part of the new design. They answered questions in an office hour on IRC about structured data for multimedia files and are looking for input on how to improve references and constraints violation reports. And to top it off the project celebrated its second birthday.

Future

 * The engineering management team continues to update the Deployments page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the annual goals, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.