Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2012-01-10

10 January 2012 Attending: Guillaume, Mark, Sumana, RobLa, Claudia

List of projects

• Wikimedia blog maintenance
• Training documentation
• Monthly report
• Communication support
• Engineering project documentation
• AOSA book
• Code review meistering
  • 1.19 code review support
• Bug Triage
• 1.18 deployment & release support
  • Individual developer assignment work (what bugs are assigned to whom)
• Bugzilla application management
• test deployment
• Recruiting/hiring
• Hackathons/events (January SF, Pune)
• Commit Access
• Recruitment/encouragement
• UCOSP
• Dev community metrics

Who's doing what

• Sumana: Recruitment/encouragement, hackathon/event prep, commit access, UCOSP
• Guillaume: monthly report, blog maintenance, training documentation, AOSA, engineering project documentation, communications support
• Mark H - Bugzilla application management, Bug Triage, code review meistering, test deployment
• Rob - Hiring, code review meistering

Wikimedia blog maintenance

Side activity last week and this week for Guillaume. i.e. I’m doing minor, quick stuff

Training documentation

Sumana helped Guillaume define some priorities in order to prepare documents for the SF hackathon. Guillaume is going to focus on those over the next two weeks.

Monthly report

The December report is out: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2011/December Thanks to everyone who helped.

Communication support

Guillaume is following up on discussions re: blog, social media, etc. as usual. Nothing special to report.

• sometime this month, Sumana to ask office IT to take ownership re IRC channel privacy

Engineering project documentation

Guillaume working on a short & simple howto to help people maintain project and status pages: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Project_documentation_howto

AOSA book

The two technical reviewers got back to us with feedback. Guillaume addressed their concerns and submitted a final version of the document to the book editors. TODO: Sumana: send a short bio to Guillaume for the book’s intro - today!

Test deployment

Working with 3 volunteers to set up http://deployment.wmflabs.org. Even have one volunteer (Oren Bochman) working on Search so we’ll get some really good testing. Should be ready to go today. Will use Meta’s bot to notify all projects.

• Plan for getting testing: Mark pointing to Sumana’s test plans. Will use sitenotice to point to them. Will spam VP pages with links & pleas.

2 biggest problems will be Wikipedia & Commons -- working with Saibo, Commons admin, to get Commons gadgets tested on test deployment site hoping Oren/Petan/Johnduhart will help get en.wp-related gadgets tested

• Mark to get help from Guillaume re blog post about this

Code review meistering

& 1.19 code review support Will focus on getting more reviews and meeting our goals. Lot of action at the end of last week, but need to get that to continue. Rob notes: good progress last week. Yesterday a bit of a slow day. Mark is now substituting individual discussions for the nagmails sometimes.

• Mark to talk to Trevor
• Robla to talk to fundraising, maxsem, yuvi

FileRepo meeting. Invited a couple of non-WMF devs. This is to accelerate code review. We need more of these meetings!

• • See how it works tomorrow, then Mark will be aggressive about setting up more.
• Mark & Sumana to cc Alolita on nagmails to rmoen & bsitu

Bug Triage

No Specific triage this week

1.18 deployment & release support

Not specifically 1.18, but I do have an rsvg binary to get out. There will probably be a 1.18.1 by February. TLDR doesn’t need to do anything yet.

Individual developer assignment work (what bugs are assigned to whom)

• Mark will look at Highest priority bugs and work with Rob to assign them. (next week?)

Bugzilla application management

Google sitemap tweaking? Seems to be working; no need to fix. “bug 708 mediawiki” -- first hit is bugzilla. “bug 189 mediawiki” bugzilla is on first page. However, the title of 189 (“add music wikimodule”) doesn’t show bugzilla in first page results, but this is probably just SEO since the top results includes lots of mailing list archives. (See Mark’s TODO list re upstreaming his previous work) has cc list default behavior changed?

• Mark to investigate, email wikitech-l

Recruiting/hiring

(private) Still recruiting for security eng, another analytics engineer Diederik van Liere is on the product management team working for Erik Möller, responsible for analytics.

Hackathons/events (January SF, Pune)

Sumana needs to:

• Check in with Alolita about recruiting for Pune
• Do January pre-hackathon survey
• Circulate https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sumanah/AHP

Commit Access

Humming along

Recruitment/encouragement

Sumana realized she should be concentrating on extensions with friendly maintainers -- but who?

• Gadgets, the API? Working with petan (Petr Bena) - friendly & helpful

UCOSP

<insert blinking NEW tag here> Canadian universities put together an Undergraduate <something> open source project http://ucosp.ca/ work with them in some way until the end of April introduce people to MediaWiki development

Dev community metrics

on hold basically; hope this weekend on the flight to put together some very basic specs to give the new analytics people

Misc.

• Guillaume heard from Lydia Pintscher about the “Open Advice” book, whose publication is approaching and will be announced in early February at Fosdem (there’s a chapter in it about user testing written by Guillaume). The book is under CC-by-sa and will be available as a PDF and on lulu & Amazon. It’s a collection of “lessons learned” from the open source world (mostly KDE).
• extensions meeting on the 13th - Virtual workshop for !MediaWiki extensions developers to help prep for 1.19 on 13 Jan 1900 UTC !Wikimedia
• Heather Walls has been doing some prettification on the hackathons pages on mediawiki.org. Is she a resource we can use? (e.g. to prettify the Wikimedia Engineering page, or the team hubs, without turning them into the CSS mess that the hackathon pages are)
  • She is a contractor.
• RobLa to look into this, talk to Sumana