Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Maps retrospective 2016-06-06

Covering whatever has happened related to the team since the last retro (2016-04-20)

NOTE: Julien wasn't able to attend, as he was at a design function.

Review action items from before

Tomasz will ensure long term plans are appropriately communicated
- Yuri will create a longer-term roadmap/vision
- Mention of maps and graphs on Annual Plan - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2016-2017/revised#Program_2:_Maintain_and_improve_content_discovery
Yuri: Tactical (shorter-term) planning
- Done. We have goals for Q4 (Apr-June) and Q1 (July-Sept)
Tomasz will talk with Volker to check on getting help from editing team on maps
- Some conversations. No tangible progress.
- Ideally would get code reviews, but not blocked. Dropping.
Guillaume: Poke Mark as needed until we get hardware
- Done
- But note that eqiad hardware not yet racked, work is ongoing, last update from Friday 3rd
Guillaume to start reading and writing documentation and ask questions
- Done (not much writing done yet, a couple of diagrams that I don't really know where to put)

Great visual improvements thanks to Julien (gradual, more to do)
Have gained better understanding of what is needed (user and tech requirements)
- Structured data storage
- UI elements
- Historical maps
- Styles / map layouts
Implemented most of the Wikivoyage customizations
- It's in test; hope to switch production very soon

Multiple GeoData regressions on Elastic Search upgrade, gotta pay more attention to stuff other than what we're currently working on
- More integration tests would help
- Elastic search is lower priority than maps work for now
Guillaume is probably the bottleneck of the team at this point (at least it feels a bit like it). I would love to be the one pushing the team faster, but not happening at the moment.
- Less shared responsibility on maps (compared to cirrus/wdqs) so Guillaume is taking more on
- Tight security restrictions contribute to this bottleneck (ops doesn't want to open it up more)
- Full admin rights for maps devs might not be palatable, but custom rights can be time-consuming and error-prone
setting up new maps server is taking forever, and not working out of the box (it should)
- Could Max help with puppet and other setup? Yeah, but depends on priorities.
- Guillaume should prioritize and structure the task; bring in Max/Yuri when it would help.
As a team, we should meet more often in shorter meetings (rather than fewer longer)

We should summarize what we gained from the conversation with folks around interactive maps and how that will shape the engineering work going forward
Not sure when eqiad hardware will be ready (but seems to be moving forward)
Team prefers to stick with half an hour for these retros, rather than going to an hour