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

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  • Tomasz will ensure long term plans are appropriately communicated
  • 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?

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  • 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?

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  • 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?

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  • 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

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  • 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