Topic on Talk:Wikimedia Developer Summit/2017

In 2013, WMF was still holding it's traditional All-Hands meetings in September (rather than January). Just prior to the All-Hands, we had "Tech Days", which was a two day invite-only event.

ArchCom was new back then. That was where we were starting to plan the first Architecture Summit in January 2014.

This 2013 email (from me) about the event was only published publicly (by me) in early 2016:

• Architecture meetings/WMF Engineering All-Hands 2013/Intro.

We're just about at the same point (chronologically) in the planning process for WikiDev17 as we were in planning for Architecture Summit 2014. I believe I'm going to find myself repeating many of the things I said back then.

Please feel encouraged to repeat many of the things you said back then that you still consider important and/or not sufficiently resolved or unresolved, so they can be discussed (preferably in dedicated threads).

One important part:

The goal of all of the above is to have the architectural conversations that are just too hard to have over email and IRC, which are manifold. This will be the place where we can chart a multi-year course for MediaWiki development. This is somewhat similar to what (I think) the Linux kernel developers do at the Linux Kernel Developers Summit (I haven’t attended, so I’m mainly relying on third-party accounts).

Having Valerie Aurora's help in the final weeks leading up to WikiDev16 was extremely valuable, since she had first-hand experience participating as a kernel developer, and was able to provide a more informed perspective on the good and the bad of that approach.