User:Martyav

Marty Hernandez Avedon (he/they), Outreachy Winter 2018 Intern and Contributor at Mediawiki



I'm a software developer from New York City.

I attended Pursuit (formerly known as C4Q) from 2016-2017, after teaching myself how to program with Python, and learning some basic web development skills.

Upon graduating from Pursuit, I worked on some iOS apps, tutored, and taught myself Java and C#.

In 2018, I apprenticed at Microsoft, on Azure's R & D team.

Prior to coding, I used to write short web articles and do print design for local businesses and nonprofits.

= Internship = My internship is sponsored by Outreachy, a project of the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Part of my internship involves working on a Phabricator task entitled Investigate and improve MediaWiki Action API documentation .

I'm running biweekly posts on martyav.github.io, about my work. This one details my project and workflow pretty thoroughly.

Project description
Improve top 50 viewed pages of the MediaWiki Action API & create a demo app to educate users

MediaWiki is the software many popular wikis run on, including the English Wikipedia. However, the documentation for using our numerous web APIs is inconsistent from article to article, and sometimes article content is incomplete or unclear.

Because MediaWiki-based projects have high visibility and are frequently used by educational programs, the documentation improvements on the top 50 pages will be very useful both to developers and site maintainers of MediaWiki-based sites, and to student who use the APIs to learn practical web development skills.

Mentors

 * User:SSethi (WMF)
 * User:Srodlund (WMF)

Articles
I have a spreadsheet of articles to work on during the internship here. As of 12 December 2018, it lists 43 articles. Some are overview pages or tutorials and don't quite fit the template model. However, they are listed due to their high importance or page ranking.

App
Drafts and more details available on User:Martyav/Apps

Tutorial
Work in progress, available at User:Martyav/Apps/Tutorial

R & D
I am currently researching frameworks to use with the apps, and mapping out userflow.

At this point (31 Jan 2019) I think it would be a good idea to get an app that utilizes the feature feed up and running, and maybe also a simplified user contributions visualizer. Both would be single page apps. The advantage of these is that their userflows have fewer branches and edge cases. We need time to document our work, as well as to code.

The feature feed would be the more straight-forward of the two. We could allow users to view picture of the day, or "On this day" articles by selecting from a calendar widget, or select a random featured article from a list of categories. This mostly just means hitting the proper API and displaying the information.

The user contributions visualizer would involve some parsing of the data from the user contributions API, so as to make it usable for the charting framework we pick (probably PyGal). I don't know yet how easy or difficult that would be. We might also want to allow users to reorder the chart by date or number of contributions.

We could and should also extend the article suggestions app we currently have. Perhaps we could do that if we have extra time.

My idea for a Wikiquiz game would involve a more complicated userflow and could serve as a side project, outside of this work.

The current bot documentation is a bit messy and assumes a lot of base knowledge, but I think it would be beyond the scope of my project to devise a tutorial, especially since I have been encountering issues with testing POST request sample code.