Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Maps retrospective 2016-08-08

Format

This retrospective was conducted using the "Five finger retrospective" format.

Yuri: Publish long-term maps roadmap
- Written; wants to discuss with team before publishing
Yuri might email Discovery asking for examples of maps uses that he could cite in the presentation
- Presented a bunch of usages.
Julien: Make sure work progresses on the State of the Maps presentation
- (jg) Presentation took place in Seattle and went quite well :)
- (jg) We could have cleaned the final version a little sooner - but last minute/4am prep is a style that Yuri particularly likes :P
Julien: Follow up on Kartographer documentation improvements
- (jg) Refactor took longer than expected
- (jg) All the front end code is precisely documented (and soonish publicly available at doc.wikimedia.org : Max? )
- (jg) To be continued: more documentation ON-wiki
Guillaume: upload (documentation) diagrams to commons (carried over)
- Done - linked from https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Maps#Puppetization_and_Automation
Kevin: Invite Guillaume to next maps retro
- Done
Kevin will schedule a meeting to discuss ops/maps relationship
- NOT NEEDED since Guillaume is working on these issues
Kevin will schedule a meeting with Yuri and Chris to figure out wiki conversation <-> phab tasks
- Initiated an email conversation
Kevin: Propose making reading SoS notes "strongly encouraged"
- Done

Awesome slides by Julien & Max, well presented, thanks!
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kscsp0YS7nw
First Wikipedias receiving Kartographer
Ops understanding that maps are moving forward
- Guillaume did some very good work on this front!
- Weekly ops/maps meetings (Mondays) - send notes to Guillaume if you have anything going on... either requireing Ops attention, or just something cool that happens
Awesome time in Seattle with the team... the Sushi, the museum, underground tour, great (and mostly productive) conversations +

We need to work on presenting better to WMF (including functionality and KPI) and to the community
- Not using existing Friday Discovery status as well as we could
- Not publicizing growth of maps enough
- Look at presenting during Metrics meeting (large audience)

setting up new maps servers (eqiad) is taking more time than it should
- 3-4 weeks is a long time to set up 4 servers
- Guillaume context switching doesn't help
- Work should have happened before and didn't
- Doing some automation which is taking longer than just "making it work" would
Still no frames around maps and still some confusion between developers
- JG: Not sure about mediawiki best coding patterns (new to it). Unsure who makes technical decisions when multiple arguments are received.
- Not sure how to prioritize good specs vs. good performance vs. iterative quick but may not be sustainable
- "Done is better than perfect". "Stalling is the least productive option".
- Would Jon Robson be a good person to talk to? Kaldari? Anyone on ArchCom? Roan?
- And Front End Standards Group.
Need KPIs, still don't have any
- We do actually have some numbers (e.g. varnish stats, maps dashboards)
- We should at least be able to say "this is the route we took and these are the benefits we got"

First Wikipedias receiving Kartographer and VE/template concerns
- They felt out of the loop from a product/release standpoint
- They have been working on some patches all along; we have gotten good contributions from them
- Yuri did mention upcoming work at SoS
Need to engage other teams more pro-actively (esp J Forrester)
Good relation with the Vega team (graphs)

we're bad at integration testing
- Max has started setting up a way to do at least some testing outside production
- GL: I'm not a big fan of integration testing, but it would probably make sense to invest a bit more than we have
- Could use the old map cluster; some vague plans
some ground work needs to happen (Cassandra upgrade, log cleanup, ...) and needs to be prioritized
- Seeing small things that need to be improved (debt)...hard to get it prioritized

Yuri: Discuss roadmap with team
Katie: Will follow up with VE team; maybe define communication norms between teams
Julien: Will ping people to try to get UI patches unstuck