Readers/Web/Team/Dev sessions

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< Readers‎ | Web‎ | Team

On Jan 29, 2015, the mobile web team met to share development workflows, tools we use, extensions, and in general how we work, in order to learn more about different ways of working with the code, patch sets, bug triaging, etc.

We plan on having this meeting monthly, and to re-cap here what we talk about so that there is a searchable log of the goodies we share and benefit community developers by having this information public.

Tools and workflows[edit]

Working with Gerrit[edit]

  • Gerrit from the command line: GerritCommandLine
    • Filter by projects, your patches, by score (Example config for .bashrc)
    • Choose a patch by number, it will download the patch, switch to it, and show the gerrit website link to it.
    • Getting the script:
      • Run make remotes on extensions/MobileFrontend to get the script into dev-scripts/remotes/gerrit.py
      • Set GERRIT_USERNAME (export GERRIT_USERNAME=JohnDoe)
      • Run it with make gerrit, make mygerrit, or directly from ./dev-scripts/remotes/gerrit.py
  • Chrome Gerrit website extension: gerrit-be-nice-to-me
    • Colorizes -1/-2 rows on the patches list in red
    • Auto expands patchsets when on a patch page (useful for seeing where comments are, and immediately having access to the patchsets)
    • Auto expands comments when on a patch page
  • Gerrit emails
    • Watch the projects you care (Settings -> Watched projects)
      • Tag gerrit emails, useful if you want to know if somebody replied to your patches
      • User filters to subtag "your patches", "merged", "abandoned". Easier to skim through all those emails.
  • Gerrit website
    • When looking at a patch list, bold means that there are new changes on the patch (that you haven't seen).

Working with Phabricator[edit]

  • Make phabricator styles your own with a custom stylesheet
  • Workflow
    • Email driven
      • Tag phabricator emails, drive most of the interaction via email (can reply to comments, make actions, etc). No workboard stuff sadly.

Command line tools[edit]

Dealing with email[edit]

  • Subscribe to multiple email lists (mobile-l, wiktech-l, ...), gerrit, phab, etc
  • Aggressively use filters and labels/tags to categorize email and read it when you want.
  • subject:Welcome list:"<wmfall.lists.wikimedia.org>" -> Mark as read
  • Use Gmail's "Mute" feature to silence useless threads (sometimes threads come back from the dead? time for a filter)

Dotfiles[edit]

Editors[edit]

  • PhpStorm
    • Complete php and web IDE with refactoring tools and good completion
    • Open source license available for employees and probably contributors
    • Plugins
      • IdeaVim: Vim bindings
      • Puppet plugin
    • Add the whole vagrant folder as a project to get settings and whole project completion
  • Vim
    • Vundle for managing plugins
    • Neocomplete or YouCompleteMe for auto completion (or ctrl_x+ctrl_o)
    • Syntastic syntax checking on the editor
      • Install with npm globally jshint and jscs or add ./node_modules/.bin to path to get good syntax checking
    • Ag.vim for code searching on the project
    • Less syntax files: groenewege/vim-less
    • Better php syntax and completion: StanAngeloff/php.vim
    • Tern.vim for javascript completion
    • luochen1990/rainbow for rainbow parens
    • scrooloose nerdcommenter for \cc \uc to comment/uncomment most file types
    • tpope/vim-surround to add/modify surrounding brackets, quotes, etc.

MediaWiki[edit]

Personal tools[edit]

  • Todos/GTD/lists
    • Trello
    • Wunderlist
    • Google tasks
    • Email
    • tiddlywiki.com
  • Dev diary
  • Streaming / recording video
    • OBS (free capturing software)
    • Sites
      • Twitch
      • Youtube

Learning & documentation[edit]

  • Learning to use extensions
    • Usually end up reading code to find what to use.
    • Dev documentation is scarce and sometimes bad.
      • Bring attention to the technical writer (S Page).
      • Edit and DIY
        • Improve it and raise patch, it's our responsability.
      • -1 patches that lack documentation.

Meeting notes[edit]