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
edit- 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)
What went well?
edit- 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
What could we improve?
edit- 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)
What else should be noted?
edit- 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
Action Items
edit- Yuri: create a longer-term roadmap/vision
- Max: investigate making puppet manifests more self-sufficient
- Guillaume: upload diagrams to commons
- Guillaume: restart conversations about opening up rights on production boxes
- Kevin: Create phab task to improve Elastic Search GeoData tests
- Kevin: Send email reminder about meeting more frequently but shorter
- Chris: write a draft of "what we learned" from interactive maps conversations