Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2012-01-17

17 Jan 2012 Attending: Guillaume, Mark, Sumana, RobLa, Claudia

List of projects

• Wikimedia blog maintenance
• SOPA/PIPA blackout
• Training documentation
• Monthly report
• Communication support
• Engineering project documentation
• Code review meistering
  • 1.19 code review support
    • beta.wmflabs.org launched and showing real problem with 1.19 launch and gadgets.
• Bug Triage
  • i18n focused on webfonts and narayam tomorrow. Will contact font designers and get them in the meeting, too.
• 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, SOPA/PIPA blackout
• Guillaume: blog maintenance, AOSA, training documentation, engineering project documentation, communications support (inc. SOPA)
• Mark H - Bugzilla application management, Bug Triage, code review meistering, test deployment (beta.wmflabs.org)
• Rob - Hiring, code review meistering

Wikimedia blog maintenance

Mutante deployed changes Guillaume’d been working on - appearance tweaks, plugin extending list of people who can upload files. Glad Daniel acted on rt req quickly, yay! :-)

SOPA/PIPA blackout

Can we be useful here, possibly by gathering testers? If things come up today, please lend a hand. See also Communications support section below Guillaume to set up boilerplate responses in OTRS today

Training documentation

Guillaume rewrote https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker and associated pages. Feedback is welcome

• Sumana to take a look and help get feedback from newbies on the talk page

Another suggested priority page before hackathon: gadgets Guillaume to work on that Wed/Thurs

• Sumana to work on API pages

Monthly report

nothing to report this week, apart from the fact Dario suggested that I basically let people write their own sections. Which is perfect IF people actually do it; we’ll see

Communication support

Guillaume reviewing and approving thousands of blog comments -- I’ve basically spent my whole day clicking the ‘approve’ button. Guillaume also setting up an OTRS queue, OTRS address, OTRS boilerplate responses, etc.

AOSA

Respond to a tiny bit of criticism (Guillaume)

Engineering project documentation

Guillaume still working on a short & simple howto to help people maintain project and status pages: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Project_documentation_howto I was hoping to finish this today but the SOPA stuff happened need to do this before asking people to do their own reports

Test deployment

Last we heard from Mark: “Working with 3 volunteers to set up http://beta.wmflabs.org. Even have one volunteer (Oren Bochman) working on Search so we’ll get some really good testing.“ Used Meta’s bot to notify all projects. Helped document a few issues there. Announced Launch on Saturday night. Gadget back-compat issue having to do with dependencies.

• Plan for getting testing: Mark pointing to Sumana’s test plans. Will use sitenotice to point to them. Will write up a plan for testing gadgets.

2 biggest problems will be Wikipedia & Commons -- working with Saibo, Commons admin, to get Commons gadgets tested on test deployment site” Enabled all gadgets on enwiki.beta and commons and found a number of dep problems.

• Mark to get help from Guillaume re blog post about this-- he will use the 18th to write a blog post

Found a backwards compat prob with gadgets and need to talk with Rob about it Ran into a problem in managing the project - was not clear enough about scope of WMF Labs project, so some volunteers got frustrated, and John Du Hart dropped out -- hope to get him back Oren has had trouble getting search set up and documentation is notvery good, but Oren is working on it Mark to get more people testing gadgets Goals for this week: blog post(need review), send another announcement with global notification bot asking people to look at gadgets, write up test plans

Code review meistering

& 1.19 code review support Friday was a banner day. We’re a lot closer to the desire line. Weekend, a little sliding. We may be at a point where FIXME noise will be useful. Mark is now substituting individual discussions for the nagmails sometimes.

• Mark to talk to Trevor -- done
• Robla to talk to fundraising, maxsem, yuvi ?

DONE -- talked to FR, don’t free up till February.  Middle of an infrastructure audit right now, done by Feb 1st we hope.  Yuvi and Max should have time (talked to Tomasz)

• TODO: Mark to reach out to yuvi & Max, cc Tomasz

How did FileRepo meeting go? Was useful. We talked about 10 revisions. Low end of adequate. But we marked 6-7 of them as reviewed. Time usage, eh. Giving people confidence in ability to review code - yay. Any sort of focused area where we seem to have trepidation about getting in & finishing off code review -- we should do this ….. Where next? Areas that have the most tagged revisions? Mobile? Get with Ryan? He’s busy with SOPA. So, another area: need to break out parts of core. Are there smaller subsections in core we can look at? Don’t rope in Brion (busy with SOPA) -- look at people who have a lot of revisions in the list, ask them, what’s the best way … what areas were you focused on in these changes? Ask people to suggest who should review them. Idea: Aaron has a ton of code.

• • TODO: Mark will be aggressive about setting up more.

Bug Triage

Internationalization triage on the 18th Mark has helped ID some bugs where they need some more community input Mark will run the triage Mark will contact people today - high priority Mark to ask Siebrand whether Mark or i18n team to do followup http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/BugTriage-i18n-2012-01

1.18 deployment & release support

“Not specifically 1.18, but I do have an rsvg binary to get out.” did it get out? (Mark confirmed with ops) - DONE Does TLDR need to do anything re 1.17.2 and 1.18.1? Not at this point.

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

has cc list default behavior changed?

• Mark to investigate, email wikitech-l

Mark has talked with the people most familiar with managing BZ and none of them knew of any change, so Mark confident that there has been no change in the behavior.

Recruiting/hiring

(private) Still recruiting for security eng, another analytics engineer Rob needs to do lots of phone screens this week. So Rob will shuffle 1:1s.

Hackathons/events (January SF, Pune)

Sumana needs to:

• Finalise https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sumanah/AHP
• Prep tutorials

Commit Access

Humming along

UCOSP

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UCOSP_Spring_2012

• need to get mentors & project(s) finalised

Dev community metrics

on hold basically;

Misc.

Platform Engineering meeting time moved. Check your calendar. Tim will be in SF

• • RobLa to look into whether Heather Walls can help with other TLDR design needs, talk to Sumana about what we need.