Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2011-12-13

( notes taken via Google Hangout)

Meta

Travel/vacation: Upcoming vacation days:

• Guillaume: (tentative) Dec. 16th, 2/3 days on week 51, 2/3 days on week 52 (see mail)
• Rob: week of Dec. 26
• Sumana: Dec. 16 + last week of year & up to Jan 3
• Mark: Last week of Dec, returning Jan 3rd

List of projects

• Bug Triage
  • Individual dev assignment work
• Bugzilla application management
  • Vandal has gone! Patch applied, might do a little more work on the generic fix.
• Hackathons/events (January SF, Pune)
• Commit Access
• Recruitment/encouragement
• Monthly report
• Communication support
• Engineering project documentation
• 1.18 deployment & release support
• Recruiting/hiring
• Code review meistering
  • mentorship/office hours plan
• Dev community metrics
• SocialCoding4Good
• Training documentation
• Wikimedia blog maintenance

Who's doing what

Sumana -- commit access, recruitment/encouragement, code review meistering, help with training documentation, planning for January hackathon & Pune hackathon Guillaume - training doc, Wikimedia blog maintenance, engineering project doc Mark H - bugzilla admin, code review, bug triage, 1.18 release followup, patch review, 1.19 ramp up. Rob - Hiring, code review meistering Siebrand - not on call, Pune hackathon planning Claudia - Bugzilla database

Bug Triage

on hold this week? Mark to focus on individual, focused meetings, checking on the assignments individual developers have -- Rob’s direct reports

Bugzilla application management

nothing to do this week

Hackathons/events (January SF, Pune)

We’re about to publicly announce the January SF hackathon Most of the travel is set up Sumana has been asked to help with 2 events in February on the same week-end:

• Pune, India (outreach like in Mumbai)
• Washington, DC (GLAM)

Coordination / help: will use the materials Guillaume is currently assembling / organizing / writing Europe hackathon probably in Berlin in April / May. WMDE organizing it

Commit Access

continuing. Sumana can do stuff with her newly acquired superpowers

Recruitment/encouragement

Sumana had contact with 50 people last week tracking contacts / people in a Google spreadsheet right now, shared it with Ryan Lane

• Sumana to talk to Claudia later
• Sumana to give robla & Mark & Guillaume access to spreadsheet

Mark wants to see the people who have contributed patches, see if Sumana have already contacted them

Monthly report

Nothing being done yet besides attending meetings and saving bookmarks to notes for later in the month

Communication support

Guillaume reviewing blog posts, etc. as needed (and also discovering major events at the last minute)

Engineering project documentation

Guillaume has done some reorganizing on the roadmap pages etc. Also project page-ified MediaWiki 1.19/Roadmap

1.18 deployment & release support

FAQ? Mark needs help with frontpage templates for mediawiki.org to link to 1.18 FAQ from the frontpage

• Mark to coordinate with Guillaume, Guillaume happy to help as soon as he knows what help is needed

RobLa says: the image rotation problem is causing many folks to seek a solution, as many Commons images are not rotating properly; they were depending on metadata being “wrong”, and now that MediaWiki uses the EXIF metadata to rotate images automatically, they’re rotated twice and thus wrong

• • may sidetrack our 1.19 image
  • These should be high priority bugs
  • Possible to say, those before a certain timestamp, or not touched since a certain time, we won’t try to fix? possible, but we should go in & fix code itself. Another problem: thumbnail generation & purging time is complicated. This is a mess. We’ll be working on that
  • we’d deploy a patch. Point release? well, probably not.
  • we may autogenerate a list of affected images, so a bot could come clean up.
  • may bring Guillaume in to communicate. this has gone from list to list. wikitech-l, foundation-l, on-wiki discussions. Heavy commons user. Did bot take care of things quickly? backlog was a day or two when there were a lot of pics to be rotated. And you can fix manually.
    • Ask Guillaume for what you need! Rob & hexmode to coordinate

1.19 rampup

Basically, CR.

Code review meistering

Mark working on CR projections. RobLa says: look at stats for today & it looks pretty good. Last few days, Antoine & Tim made a big dent. http://toolserver.org/~robla/crstats/ We are down from 800 ish to under 700.

• on back burner: Mark & Sumana gathering testers.
• Mark to take over nag emails (daily) re code review groups. Don’t make it too bot-like. Quick update. “Here’s where we are.”

Guillaume has improved the code review guide. See the training docs section. Sumana & patch review queue coming up in Platform Eng meeting

mentorship/office hours plan

Sumana quietly recruiting.

Recruiting/hiring

(non-public discussion)

• Sumana to review Rob’s blog post today

Dev community metrics

on hold, sorry, need to gather some thoughts, this week?

• Sumana

SocialCoding4Good

waiting for VMWare announce posted to wikitech-l (yay no secrecy!) backburner until further notice

Training documentation

Guillaume finished listening to the audio recordings of the July 2011 code review training session and taking notes. Currently cleaning up Code review guide and associated pages before I add content from the notes. Should be done by the end of this week. Also found Manual:Pre-commit checklist which seems like it would benefit from more integration with the other pages. I’ll probably think about a navigation panel / tool of some sort to link these pages (probably chronologically in the flow of a commit) A lot of the linking-together of pages (how to get SVN access, precommit checklist) will be helpful to newbies. Aiming to have intro tutorial by Jan 20th -- Yuvi to help.

• Sumana to look at pages once a week, and if we see one particular area is weak & should be expanded, speak up.
• Sumana to work on fulfilling the list of required tutorials & help domain experts develop spiels, tutorials, etc. for Jan hackathon
  • add red links to inventory

Wikimedia blog maintenance

Guillaume did some work last week. No work on it this week yet, mostly focusing on training documentation (but there are some time-sensitive tweaks to make that I’ll probably get around to this week anyway, probably on Friday)

Misc

Remember that Guillaume is out on Thursday (taking the train to Normandy) Sumana is out Friday Visual Editor deployment --- proof of concept on mediawiki.org. Set expectations low!! You cannot edit a page with it right now!