Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2013-07-30

From mediawiki.org

July 30th[edit]

Today's the monthly retrospective to show off our work to RobLa :-)

Andre[edit]

  • puppetizing/debianizing BZ - see July 2nd comment from Faidon on https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/62404/ -- Andre to follow up with Mark Hershberger and with Ops team in August
  • talking about RT & BZ - Andre has sent note to Ken, will follow up in August
  • Ken & RobLa see this as rather a longer-term project, may not be by end of calendar year, because Ops team will have lots of work with ULSFO and other data center work
  • may need earnest reeval of ticket tracking systems; last one was 2010

TODO: Figure out when Andre would do prep work of initial eval of ticket tracking systems Second TODO: Andre to get historical background from Guillaume

What did we do in July & what's next?[edit]

Also:

  • ECT quarterly review
  • contacts with Mailman & Bugzilla upstream, arranged coworking days in NYC with OpenITP & Kaltura
  • managed social issues with contributors (mailing lists, onwiki, IRC, BZ)
  • recruiting/diversity consultation
  • we spoke at various conferences
  • planning for August & January architecture meetings
  • ESL tutoring

Next:

  • Wikimania prep & followup
  • more QA training
  • QA + Release Engineering review
  • OPW/GSoC metamentorship; collecting ideas for January-March round
  • Bugzilla: Puppetize/Debianize it
  • Guillaume mostly off in August with VE communications support; continuing blog entry review
  • Sumana investigating partnerships with more organizations (upstreams, diversity-oriented internship programs) and allying with Ada Initiative in Code of Conduct investigation

Rob:

  • This all looks good
  • TODO: Next time: Structure it by tying it to quarterly review & roadmap to reduce "wall of stuff" effect :)
  • Goal to get volunteers writing automated tests - lots of activity towards that. Goal of awareness - also activity towards that. Good.
  • Community metrics - see activity statuses. Next step - chat at Wikimania.

(discussion of hiring pipeline stuff, internships) TODO: schedule next quarterly review for October. Just get them as recurring meetings. 75 minutes. For consideration:

"one thing that was brought up in the Board elections questions & answers was the (ongoing) need to triage feature requests by the community, including especially requests for features from experienced & admin users, and feature requests from the sister projects.
One of the ideas in the candidate answers was to focus more on building a central place where feature requests (and cool existing tools) can be shared between language editions and projects, and where feature ideas could get refined outside of bugzilla & the lists; another idea was to build a kind of technical committee to help collect and refine these ideas. Then of course there is the actual technical work of addressing these requests."
  • Well, this is a little like volunteer product management :)
  • There's a pitfall in adding voting
  • TODO: Let's make sure this comes up at least in the quarterly review, or at end of August. Want to coordinate with LCA

Activity statuses to update for this month[edit]

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/July

  1. 1.22: we'll have an odd cycle to work around Wikimania for wmf13. Put deployments on hiatus. May want to change name of that section to release engineering/mgmt (more general). Also needs to cover awarding of contract for # MediaWiki release management of tarball.
  2. Git conversion - also to rename. We're now done for now. :) Probably more work to do over next year, with general budget for contractor for dev tools, but pretty much done. Pywikipedia moved to Git so SVN is read-only.
  3. Multimedia: Fabrice to provide update, Platform to update
  4. Admin tools - hiatus
  5. Auth systems - should be an OAuth deployment to beta this week, testwikis after Hong Kong
  6. HipHop deployment - mainly on hold, some minor work on VMs.
  7. Security -- no security releases in July
  8. Beta cluster: has some ownership... Antoine will be doing this status.

TODO: send a specific request with Fabrice, ask for them by end of tomorrow.

Conferences, dates[edit]

Wikimania coming up Aug 7-11 Rachel- vacation Aug 5-9

  • Guillaume: possibly a couple days off in August/September; will provide tentative dates as soon as they're known
  • Andre:
    • July Wed31-August Mon05: GNOME GUADEC (Brno/CZ)
    • August Wed07-August Mon12: Wikimania (Hongkong/PRC)
    • October Fri04-Sun06: Mozilla Summit 2013
  • Sumana
  • Quim in Germany until Wikimania, except
    • Quim finishing holidays tomorrow July 31. Then flying to Hong Kong on Aug 2.
  • Željko:
    • vacation late July - early August
    • August 16, eurucamp/JRubyConf EU Workshop, Berlin, Germany
    • September 6-7, BalCCon, Novi Sad, Serbia
    • September 27-28, CITCON, Turin, Italy
    • November 7, SQA Days, Lviv, Ukraine
  • Chris:
    • Aug 4-10 Agile2013 - "radically open software testing"
    • Aug 23 PTO
    • possible days off in October

Other conference deadlines:

  • FOSDEM - with Siebrand, Quim is chasing FOSDEM people :) - as soon as there is a call for devrooms/booths Quim will start discussion