Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2012/July

 Engineering metrics in July:
 * unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unreviewed commits went from about 320 to about 370.
 * About shell requests were processed.
 * developers got developer access to Git and Wikimedia Labs.
 * Wikimedia Labs now hosts projects,  instances and  users.

Major news in July include:

Recent events
Pre-Wikimania hackathon (10–11 July 2012, Washington, D.C., USA)

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.



Announcements

 * Peter Youngmeister, who was working as a contractor for the Operations team, was converted to full-time Technical Operations Engineer (announcement).
 * S Page joined the Editor engagement experiments team as Software Engineer (announcement).
 * S Page joined the Editor engagement experiments team as Software Engineer (announcement).

Site infrastructure


Data Centers

Object Store/Swift

Testing environment
Wikimedia Labs

Backups and data archives
Data Dumps
 * The YAS3 library for uploading to archive.org and to other s3-compatible sites as well, along with several command line clients, is now usable though still under heavy development. This library handles 100-Continue correctly; this means that for large file uploads, the upload is only attempted once the client has been redirected to the right host, a great time saver.  The library also supports uploads of large failes in multiple chunks automatically, rather than requiring the user to split the file into separate pieces.  That's a necessity for us since many of our dump files are quite large.   Browse the code via gitweb. Coming soon: Google additions, example scripts for XML dump uploading.

Offline
Kiwix


 * We finally released Kiwix 0.9 rc1, see the CHANGELOG. All the binary files were compiled using our new continuous integration build platform. In collaboration with Wikimedia France for the Afripedia project, we released a first version of kiwix-plug, a standalone WIFI hotspot using cheap plug computers. We also have finished the Wikimedia CH (Switzerland) Black&White project, one of the last achievements was the introduction of Kiwix in Debian official package repository. We started, also in collaboration with Wikimedia CH, a new project called ZIM autobuild which has for purpose to generate quickly and automatically ZIM files of our projects.

Wikidata

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

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.