Core Platform Team

Group:	Platform Engineering
Start:	2018-07-01
End:	2020-07-01
Team members:	Clara Andrew-Wani, Kate Chapman, Cindy Cicalese, Will Doran, Eric Evans, Daniel Kinzler, Holger Knust, Alex Paskulin, Petr Pchelko, Bill Pirkle, Tim Starling, Hugh Nowlan, Nikki Nikkhoui, Naïké Nembetwa Nzali, Mat Nadrofsky, Gabriele Modena, Wendy Quarshie, Thomas Chin, Frances Goodwin
Backlog:	#Core_Platform_Team
Lead:	Corey Floyd

The Core Platform Team has the primary responsibility for the Platform that supports the projects of the Wikimedia Movement. The platform is comprised of MediaWiki and the Wikimedia service infrastructure which provides our services, APIs and tools. Additionally, the team supports MediaWiki as a FLOSS product to be used by 3rd parties to host and share knowledge in a variety of contexts.

This team was formed in July 2018 by merging the MediaWiki Platform team and the Services team. In July 2020, the team was evolved into a larger Platform Engineering group with separate workstreams for "MediaWiki Expedition", "API", "Data", and "Platform Operations and Dumps".

Mission

We shepherd Wikimedia’s essential software and infrastructure technologies enabling our users and developers to unlock free knowledge.

Our values and how we model them in our work

Knowledge sharing

We continually learn and hone our skills to apply the best solutions to challenges
When learning something new, we aim to share it with both within and outside the team and encourage others to do the same
We proactively share our knowledge, collaboratively work on solutions, and provide mentoring whenever we can
We prefer to aid others in achieving their goals, rather than solving problems for them. This both empowers them and makes our team and organization stronger
We actively and frequently talk to our teammates about their work and challenges over simply asking them if they need help.

Clear and respectful communication

We ensure all voices are heard in discussions by asking the opinions of others who have not spoken up.
We give detailed code reviews and try to communicate the “why” as well as the “what”.
When we offer criticisms, we also offer help and assistance getting to a solution.
We volunteer our thoughts and perspectives while considering and respecting the thoughts and perspectives of others
When we offer criticisms, we are careful to re-evaluate our own assumptions and are open to changing our minds.

Quality work

We strike a balance between constraints and long-term implications of our work
We follow the architecture principles whenever possible and be sure to communicate our rationale to others when we don’t
We focus on projects that deliver clear and measurable impacts
We use experiments to figure out new paths while minimizing risks in order to overcome challenges
We use our own products for our work whenever possible in order to better understand and improve our software.
We do not hold ourselves to perfection, but we do establish good metrics of success that allow us space to experiment while minimizing risks
We keep the codebase clean and hold others accountable to do the same in order to minimize tech debt.

Effective and Inclusive Collaboration

We take time to get input from team members on decisions that affect them.
We always try to finish what we are working on before starting something new.
We try to solve problems ourselves first because we value the time of our teammates, but we don’t wait too long before asking someone else because we also value our own time.
We make an effort to promptly respond to messages so to not block other team members.
We keep our code reviews focused on facilitating merging, minimizing feedback that are not required for the code’s goal and provide actionable comments
We collaboratively support other teams’ goals by proactively asking them for their needs and requirements and providing them timely responses and concrete decisions and feedback.
We keep our priorities clear and work on what is most important.
We give people the space, opportunity and trust to grow, even if it means the most skilled person isn’t working on a task.

Goals

To lead the maintenance and improvement of the MediaWiki platform.
To assist and encourage feature development on top of MediaWiki by providing developers with a clean and elegant core.
To provide value for end users by undertaking feature development work which is primarily architectural in nature.
To create and publish a MediaWiki roadmap to assist planning of internal and external users.
To establish guidelines and standards for the MediaWiki core code.
To automate monitoring, metric reporting and logging for Wikimedia services.
To keep the majority of services simple and stateless by offering general multi-datacenter storage and change propagation solutions.
To make our infrastructure more flexible, robust and efficient by gradually migrating from a monolithic architecture to micro-services.

Roadmap

An updated list of projects we're working on is visible in Phabricator on the Platform Engineering Roadmap.

Platform Engineering Team Initiatives

The Platform Engineering Team work process involves a number of stages that derive from the PET Roadmap, which maps at a high level the layout of all initiatives that the PET is responsible to complete or support. Initiatives are drawn from the PET Roadmap and entered into PET Initiative Planning. The Director, Senior Project Manager, Product Managers, Engineering Managers and Technical Leads are responsible for the work of developing the initial outline to a full proposal decomposed into Epics and Tasks ready to be scheduled and implement by Engineers.

All PET Initiatives are published and updated through out planning and implementation on our wiki.

The PET is composed of 2 functional teams specialising in Distributed System and Storage, and Features, Data and Content. Within PET we break down into 3 core teams, 2 teams focused on product work and 1 Clinic Duty Team. Our work process is agile based using 2 week sprints. The content of the sprints is determined in pre-sprint planning. Product teams are formed based on the functional requirements of the projects to be undertaken while the Clinic Duty team is rotated on a sprint by sprint basis.

Work Processes

Individual Goals

Members of our team set goals each quarter in order to support other team members and their own professional development.

Core Platform Team/Goals/FY1920/Q1

Workboards

#platform-engineering
- This board contains our Inbox and a set of columns identifying the Initiatives we are working on and the prioritized tasks of work to complete each
#platform-team-workboards
- This board contains the PET Icebox and each of our sub team work boards
  - #sf-contract, our contractor workboard
  - #cpt-clinic, our Clinic Duty Team workboard
  - #cpt-prod-green, Product Team
  - #cpt-prod-arch-review, Architecture Team

Documents

Platform Design Doc Template: File:Platform Design Doc Template.pdf

Development Practices

Testing

Decisions of Record, Architecture and Research

Team Improvement Working Groups

Workboards

Contact the team

wikitech-l mailing list
#wikimedia-services ^connect IRC channel
#mediawiki-core ^connect IRC channel

Past Programs

2018-2019