Wikimedia Engineering/WMF Tech Days 2012

WMF Tech Days is an annual meeting of Wikimedia Foundation engineering staff and contractors, held next to the Wikimedia Foundation all-staff meeting. All Wikimedia Foundation employees and most engineering contractors will participate.

We're currently targeting September 11-12 for the tech days (Tuesday/Wednesday), while the all-staff will take place on September 13 and 14. The venue hasn't been determined yet, but it will not be the SF office due to space constraints, and it will be in San Francisco reachable in walking distance from people's hotels or via public transportation.

Due to limited space, this is an invitation-only event, but we'll aim to document things in public as much as possible.

To mitigate people's exhaustion and stress level, this event will not be held on a weekend, and the second day will be less meeting-focused and structured more like a hackathon.

September 11 agenda
On-site prep: 8:00-10:00AM Set up schedule wall (6 groups / timeslots)

Start: 10:00am - 1 large group, main room Intro and Q&A by Sue

10:30 - 10 minute top line goals/roadmap review (Erik) - 1 large group, main room

10:45 - 11:15 teams/topics - 1 large group, main room What do you do / what's your goal? What's your major pain point / blocker? What are you most proud of as a team?

11:15 - 11:20 - 5 minute break

11:20 - Topic seeding process and sign-up

11:40 - Sessions start - break out, both rooms

12:30 - Lunch

13:30 - Sessions continue / Training track

14:30 - Sessions continue / Training track

15:30 - Department-level meetings

17:00 - Reconvene / report-back

17:50 - room reconfiguration

18:00 - Dinner - @ The Box

19:00 - Drinks/Social event

September 12 agenda
TBD, but likely hackathon-style with less rigid agenda

On-site prep: 9am - 10am

Start: 10:00am

12:30 - Lunch

17:00 - Hackathon showcase

Dinner? Possible last min beer/pizza order if people want to stick around

Wishlist / parking lot

 * Process fun
 * 20% time / managing the CR backlog
 * Cross-functional meetings
 * Moving Mobile into MediaWiki core
 * Notifications
 * MediaWiki core vision: Scribunto, Parser, WikiData?…
 * Universal Language Selector: impact/rollout discussion
 * Design Toolkit rollout: style guide, etc.
 * Google Summer of Code mentors retrospective and information-sharing
 * QA / testing event planning
 * Bug Wrangler / Product meeting
 * Architecture review: DB sharding, memcached, API, ...
 * Anatomy of a feature from a UI/UX perspective: Universal Language Selector (Pau Giner)
 * Future vision of Wikimedia wikis - where do we want to be in 1 year/3 years and how do we get there?
 * Analytics/Kraken
 * Training
 * Mingle!
 * Performance: profiling using xhprof, query analysis, …
 * Security
 * Team sprints
 * Ops deployment sprint: EQIAD / West Coast caching DC