Topic on Talk:Technical Community Newsletter

Thanks for your work on this newsletter, I enjoy reading it!

I'm wondering if you all would be interested to experiment with a more frequent cadence (weekly, every two weeks). That way, one can stay tuned to this newsletter to find out about cool new features/experiments/capabilities/best practices relatively quickly, instead of up to 2-3 months after submission. I'm wondering also if we could make it easier to solicit more one-line additions with links to mw.org/phab, to help circulate more highlights, more quickly.

I have added a note to discuss this question/suggestion in the next fortnightly Developer Advocacy team meeting. I am interested to hear different perspectives on this.

My primary concern about setting an expectation of increased frequency would be increased pressure on the Developer Advocacy team to "fill up" the newsletter for each publication date.

@KHarlan (WMF) Do you have an expectation about who specifically in the technical community you would hope to reach with more frequent announcements? Is that audience different than the audience for the weekly meta:Tech/News newsletter?

I have added a note to discuss this question/suggestion in the next fortnightly Developer Advocacy team meeting. I am interested to hear different perspectives on this.

Thanks!

My primary concern about setting an expectation of increased frequency would be increased pressure on the Developer Advocacy team to "fill up" the newsletter for each publication date.

Agreed, I don't think that would be particularly sustainable. I was wondering if something loosely organized like Scrum of Scrums page could work. The idea being that if a developer has something interesting they'd like to share out, they could add it to a wiki page with < 1 minute of effort. The work of the newsletter distributors would then be to clean up / polish the page before sending it out.

@KHarlan (WMF) Do you have an expectation about who specifically in the technical community you would hope to reach with more frequent announcements? Is that audience different than the audience for the weekly meta:Tech/News newsletter?

WMF, WMDE, and 3rd party MediaWiki developers, and volunteer contributors. I think meta:Tech/News is more oriented towards explaining technical changes to editors and less technical users ("monitor recent software changes likely to impact Wikimedians, and receive a weekly summary on your talk page, without technical jargon."). Whereas, what I'd like to see with more frequency is the "technical jargon" updates for engineers. Things like:

• There's now an IReadableDatabase interface you should use instead of IDatabase
• You can read settings from a YAML file Manual:YAML settings file format
• job queue processing was broken on beta cluster, here is why and the patch / commands that fixed it (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T332207)
• Growth team is experimenting with building standalone Vue components to import into GrowthExperiments MediaWiki code, follow progress here

As an engineer, those types of updates are all useful things to know about, or at least be able to scan and decide if I want to learn more. As it is, I learned about each of those things somewhat randomly.

I guess what I am trying to express is that, even though I try to follow IRC, WMF Slack, Phabricator (tasks & blog posts), wikitech-l, and chat with people, it's still too hard to track the pulse of what new / important / interesting technical problems and/or solutions are being discussed or offered. And perhaps a crowdsourced, more frequent bulletin with one line summaries, that's easy to scan for relevant content, would enable more engineers to find relevant information more easily.

Hi, it looks like we first need to discuss the bigger picture: The differences in scope with regard to meta:Tech/News (which is weekly)? The examples in the previous comment look like Tech News territory to me but I admit that the nuances in scope are not clear to me.

what I'd like to see with more frequency is the "technical jargon" updates for engineers.

I feel that the specific examples given here are the sorts of things that once were common to announce and discuss on the wikitech-l mailing list.

I feel that the specific examples given here are the sorts of things that once were common to announce and discuss on the wikitech-l mailing list.

That's a good point. I'll see if I can try to get better about posting these types of things to wikitech-l, and maybe we can make that list more active again.