Wikimedia Discovery/Team/Onboarding/Chelsy

This is the onboarding page for Chelsy Xie.

This checklist is intended to be a rough guideline for your onboarding at the Foundation. It is expected that it will take about a week for you to complete many of the points on the list. If there's something missing, feel free to add it! If there's something that doesn't seem useful for you, feel free to remove it.

Setting computers up, setting accounts up and getting known

• Generate two SSH keys (see this article on GitHub for instructions): one for our analytics machines and one for labs ("Wikitech") access.
• Create a Wikitech account. Go to Preferences → OpenStack and include the public part of a newly-generated SSH key. Get Erik B. to give you access to the relevant machines.
• Create a Phabricator account by logging in with your MediaWiki account (akin to signing in via Facebook or Google) Get Mikhail to sign you up to all the appropriate boards (e.g. Analysis Sprint Board and Discovery Board) and walk you through the process of working with cards.
• File a Phabricator ticket in the Ops-Access queue, CC-ing Dan and Mikhail, containing the public part of a newly-generated SSH key, asking for access to stat1002 ("stat2"), stat1003 ("stat3"), and fluorine. Don't worry about what those names mean just yet.
• Get an IRC client. Join irc.freenode.net and #wikimedia-discovery. Welcome to our team live chat!
  • Learn about cloaks and request one. (It can take a few days for the cloak stuff to be resolved.)
  • Additional channels to join: /join: #wikimedia-discovery, #wikimedia-analytics, #wikimedia-research, #wikimedia-ai, #wikimedia-operations
• Schedule staff photo (just list your name here)
  • Or you can list yourself as not wanting to have your photo up by adding your name under the cloak of invisibility list.
• Add yourself to the team page—twice: in the info box at the top of the page, and under the section "The Team | Members".
• Subscribe to some mailing lists using your @wikimedia.org account
  • The public list
  • The private list
  • Introduce yourself on the public list.
• Setup your SSH configuration (refer to the EOM supplement on Office wiki)
• In Terminal on OS X, go to Preferences → Profiles → Shell. Check Run command and type in: eval ssh-agent and check Run inside shell.
• Remember to add your two private keys to ssh-agent: ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/[private key]. On Mac, -K allows you to add the private key to your computer's keychain permanently.
• Get Mikhail to poke Andrew Otto (ottomata on IRC/Phabricator) to add you to analytics-search-users group so you can su analytics-search on stat2 to manage our scheduled data collection job(s).
• Poke Dan to introduce you on wmfall (so all WMF staff are aware of you joining us because you're awesome and it's great that you're on our team now).

Meeting interesting people

This list should take about 2 weeks to get through. A thing to keep in mind is that people are bound to mention technical things that they're working on or have worked on that you may not have familiarity with. Don't be afraid to ask "what's that?" We're not gonna fire you because you had to ask what a web request is or what JSON is :P

• You should sit down with Katie Horn – Director of Discovery – and discuss the department's goals and get an overview of the various teams.
• You should sit down with Dan Garry – Product Lead for Discovery and your Line Manager – to talk about our team's goals and relationship with other teams.
• You should sit down with Deb Tankersley – Analysis team's Product Manager – to talk about how Discovery Analytics supports her work and teams.
• You should speak to Kevin Smith about the team's processes for tracking work.
• Grab Trey Jones, a wicked-smaht text processing specialist, linguist, and our relevance engineer and he knows mathz too
• Grab Erik Bernhardson, who knows far too much about our search systems and event logging.
• Talk to Chris Koerner (Discovery's Community Liaison) about the community!
• Talk to Aaron Halfaker about research in the context of Wikipedia users, and Ellery Wulczyn to chat about data analysis at the Foundation.
• Talk to Michelle Paulson from legal about privacy and data sources.
• Talk to Helen Jiang who is a recently hired data analyst in Editing.
• Make sure Mikhail has added you to the research group meetings.
• Attend the Community Liaison Cabal meeting to ask questions and hear about the way people interact with our community.

Working on projects

• Go through the Dashboarding & Testing presentation Oliver and Mikhail gave at All Hands 2016. Make a list of questions. Try to answer as many of them as you can by reading through our Employee Operations Manual on Meta. This is less a test for you and more of a test for the thoroughness of the EOM :) Mikhail will answer whatever questions you can't find an answer to.
• Check out the statistical graph literacy talk Mikhail gave (YouTube recording, Slides)
• See if you can run this presentation written in RMarkdown.
• Pick a small (low point value) task from Phabricator. Work on it! Reach out to Mikhail if you run into any issues or it requires specific domain knowledge.
• Learn about past analytic work from the Resolved column on Phabricator.
• Talk through big upcoming projects with Dan, Deb and Mikhail and how you fit into them. Dan or Deb will setup a meeting after your first couple of weeks.
• Check and update this page in the first week or two if your experience was different than how it was described here to be. Your first major task is to spot holes in this thing we call a wiki page, fill 'em up, and make onboarding better for the next person. :)

Useful Links

• Discovery Department,
• Discovery Process, to learn about structure, meetings, communications and workflow.