Technical Community Newsletter/2019/October

Notes on the first issue
Welcome to the first issue of the Wikimedia Technical Community Newsletter!

The Wikimedia Technical Community Newsletter will be published quarterly. It will share highlights and news from the past quarter and information about events coming up in the next quarter.

Features

 * The first Coolest Tool Award!
 * Wikimedia's Javascript Initialisation on a Budget. Learn more here, And, here!
 * Cloud-VPS Puppetmasters Moved to VMs, thanks to Krenair

What's new?
The Wikimedia Technical Community has been up to a lot of great things this quarter!


 * The 2019 Hackathon in Stockholm had many awesome outcomes!
 * The first Small Wiki toolkits working session was held at Wikimania 2019 in August in Stockholm. Participants worked together to discuss ways to support and strengthen their smaller wiki communities. Learn more.
 * Google Summer of Code 2019 finished for the year. Wikimedia mentors partnered with mentees from around the globe to support 15 technical projects.
 * Outreachy Round 18 concluded. Outreachy is an internship program that seeks to support underrepresented groups in technology. This round, three interns participated on projects that helped to improve the overall quality of a variety of Wikimedia technical projects.
 * Wikimedia hosted three, hour long technical talks. The talks covered a wide range of topics and provided valuable information for the technical community.
 * September: How to compare text across multiple languages
 * September: Documenting Wikimedia Projects
 * August: A Deployment Pipeline Overview

Wikimedia
A selection of Wikimedia conferences and workshops happening this quarter:


 * October 4-6, 2019: WikiCon Wuppertal
 * November 8-11, 2019: Wikiconference North America
 * October 4-6, 2019: WikiArabia
 * October 11-13,2019: Wikimedia CEE Meeting
 * October 25-26, 2019: WikidataCon 2019
 * October 26, 2019 Wikibase workshop Berlin 2019
 * Novemer 8-10, 2019 WikiIndaba conference 2019
 * November 12-15, 2019: Wikimedia Technical Conference 2019
 * November 23, 2019: Česká Wikikonference

Free and Open Source
A selection of Free and Open Source Conferences happening this quarter:

North America
 * November 6-8, 2019: Aspiration Summit this "collaborative three-day gathering is designed for everyone from grassroots activists to software developers, bringing together participants from around the world to share knowledge, build relationships, and collectively envision the future of free and open technology to support social change."
 * November 18-21, 2019: KubeCon | CloudnativeCon North America 2019

Europe
 * February 1-2, 2020 Fosdem "is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate."
 * October 1, 2020, call for proposal due.

Get involved!

 * Do you have news you'd like to share with the technical community? Leave a note on the discussion page!
 * Have you been working on a cool tool or Wikimedia technical project? Are you interested in sharing what you know with others? Consider giving a technical talk.
 * Are you a interested in writing better technical documentation? Join the Friends of the Docs!
 * Mentor a Google Code-In project.