Wikimedia Engineering/WMF Tech Days 2012

From mediawiki.org

WMF Tech Days is an annual meeting of Wikimedia Foundation engineering staff and contractors, held next to the Wikimedia Foundation all-staff meeting. All Wikimedia Foundation employees and most engineering contractors will participate.

Due to limited space, this is an invitation-only event, but we'll aim to document things in public as much as possible.

To mitigate people's exhaustion and stress level, this event will not be held on a weekend, and the second day will be less meeting-focused and structured more like a hackathon.

What, when, and where, summary[edit]

  • Tue, Sep 11: Unconference.
    • Location: The Box (Howard & 7th St, Yelp link).
    • Official start at 10 AM.
  • Wed, Sep 12: Hackathon.
    • Location: The Box (Howard & 7th St, Yelp link).
    • Official start at 10 AM.

Web references[edit]

  • Use this very wiki page for schedule and clean, readable information about the event.
  • Use the Etherpad for messy, fun pre-event prep discussion and during-event meeting notes.

September 11 agenda[edit]

Start:

10:00am - Intro and Q&A by Sue. (1 large group, main room)

10:30 - 10 minute top line goals/roadmap review (Erik) (1 large group, main room)

10:45 - 11:05: Hear from each team a brief introduction (1 large group, main room)

  • What do you do / what's your goal?
  • What's your major pain point / blocker?
  • What are you most proud of as a team?

11:05 - 11:20: Topic seeding, part 1: People write up things they'd like to make sessions of (1 large group, main room)

11:20 - 11:35: Brief explanations of each topic, plus show-of-hands for who's interested in attending, followed by schedule wrangling (1 large group, main room)

11:35 - 11:40: 5 minute break

11:40 - Sessions start - break out, both rooms

12:30 - Lunch

13:30 - Sessions continue / Training track

14:30 - Sessions continue / Training track

15:30 - Department-level meetings / Sessions continue

17:00 - Reconvene / report-back (session summaries)

17:50 - room reconfiguration

18:00 - Dinner - @ The Box

19:00 - Drinks/Social event

September 12 agenda[edit]

TBD, but likely hackathon-style with less rigid agenda

On-site prep: 9am - 10am

Start: 10:00am

12:30 - Lunch

17:00 - Hackathon showcase

Dinner? Possible last min beer/pizza order if people want to stick around

General logistics to know[edit]

  • The place has two projectors. Assume VGA connectivity works.

Wishlist / parking lot[edit]

  • Process fun
    • 20% time / managing the CR backlog
  • Cross-functional meetings
    • Moving Mobile into MediaWiki core
    • Notifications
    • MediaWiki core vision: Scribunto, Parser, WikiData?…
    • Universal Language Selector: impact/rollout discussion
    • Design Toolkit rollout: style guide, etc.
    • Google Summer of Code mentors retrospective and information-sharing
    • QA / testing event planning
    • Bug Wrangler / Product meeting
    • Architecture review: Database sharding, memcached, API, ...
    • Anatomy of a feature from a UI/UX perspective: Universal Language Selector (Pau Giner)
    • Future vision of Wikimedia wikis - where do we want to be in 1 year/3 years and how do we get there?
    • Analytics/Kraken
    • revtagging/usertagging
  • Training
    • Mingle!
    • Performance: profiling using xhprof, query analysis, …
    • Security
  • Team sprints
    • Ops deployment sprint: EQIAD / West Coast caching DC