Wikimedia Engineering/WMF Tech Days 2013/Brainstorming

Schedule

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see main page

Day 1: General discussion/workshop

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  • Discussions will be on the afternoon of Day 1 (Tuesday) on September 10, 2013. 1:30-5:30PM
  • It will be held in various conference rooms on the 3rd floor, plus space will be made in the north end of the 3rd floor using the couches and white dividers
  • Each session will be 45minutes - 90 minutes in length (depending on the time slot)
  • There will be two major workshop tracks (either from Product/Design, Engineering, or AllTech) running concurrently with up to 3 (or more) smaller discussions.
  • These sessions will not be videotaped, any artifacts/preparations are on your end (inform Rachel if you have any needs for recording, videoconferencing, etc.).
  • It's probably best to assign a note-taker to record down the essentials.

Topics sorted by number of votes:

Design at the WMF

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Leads
Jared Zimmerman + other presenters
Schedule
2:45 pm - 90 minutes - North side of 3rd floor
Audience
  • Front-End Developers
  • Product Managers
  • Anyone else interested in design and pattern thinking
Outcomes
  • Explain how Design will be functional cross-team across the WMF
  • Consistent, appropriate cross device experiences
  • Q & A

---Break---

Discussion
  • Creating awareness about the work of the design group (agora controls, typography) (other than a PDF) so people can participate and give feedback
  • Start conversation with a design intro transitions to technical aspects
  • Who uses and will use Agora controls
    • Teams ready for Agora controls: Flow, Onboarding, OAuth, Visual Editor, Account Creation/Login, Language Engineering.
  • Discussion vs. presentation (e.g. LESS) ratio?
Votes (6+8+2)
Design across device classes - Vector, etc. on tablets, handsets, & desktop
Design direction and consistency - Agora, "Jared" update (e.g. Flow prototype), building CSS with LESS, revising the font stack
Implementing a responsive, proportional grid system in MediaWiki -- why and how.

Product/Data workshop

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Leads
Dario Taraborelli, Aaron Halfaker, Toby Negrin
Schedule
1:30 pm - 60 minutes - 6th floor collab space
Audience
  • PMs and analysts: how do we incorporate data into product decisions?
  • Engineers wanting to incorproate data
Outcomes
  • how we use data at the WMF (more broadly)
  • how do we plan tests and metrics?
  • how do we incorporate data into product decisions
Discussion
  • merged "Working with data in your product"
  • Not ready for prime-time, put it in day 1 and call it a workshop
Votes (10)

Community & Transparency

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Leads
Oliver Keyes
Schedule
4:00 pm - 20 minutes - R66 (Community overview)
4:30 pm - 60 minutes - R66 (Transparency in product design)
Audience
  • for developers (especially newcomers)?
  • for PMs on user-facing products that interface with the community
Outcomes
  • Basic tutorial on existing WP community, processes, and places to be familiar with
  • Create a policy for community-informed development
Discussion
Votes (6+6)
An overview / tour of WP community, processes, places to be familiar with
Transparency in Product/Design/whatever decision-making - how to do it and why.

Career pathing in Tech at WMF

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Leads
Erik Moller, Gayle
Schedule
4:30 pm - 60 minutes - North side of 3rd floor
Audience
Everyone in Tech
Outcomes
  • Flesh out the careers page
  • Formallizing titles for consistency
    • Senior/Lead engineering renormalization
    • Discussion on architect?
    • discussion on growth path from senior -> architect/management
    • discussion of roles/level separations
Discussion
Votes (9)

Architecture discussion - checkin (RfCs)

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Leads
  • RobLa
  • Tim Starling
Schedule
2:45 pm - 90 minutes - 6th floor Collab
Note: Needs videoconferencing capability for Tim to participate
Audience
  • tech leads esp. if involved in core-mediwiki.
  • senior developers (front-end and back-end)
Outcomes
  • Walking tech leads through when/how to use the RFC process to ensure broader socialization
  • more generally how to make changes to architecture.
  • Preview of arch summit in January
Discussion
Votes (9)

Remote working at the WMF

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https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/TechDays-RemoteWorking

Leads

  • Gayle Young
  • Siebrand Mazeland
  • Tomasz Finc
  • Alolita Sharma
Schedule
1:30 pm - 60 minutes - R37
  1. (15 minutes) List/Discussion of things that worked (among teams, or generally)
  2. (15 minutes) List of pain points, unresolved issues
  3. (15 minutes) Discussion of some ideas or other practices that can be incorporated (one great example I found is buried on some of Zach Holman's talks about Github's distributed workforce)
  4. (15 minutes) Generate list of easy-to-fail actions to improve remote work
Audience
  • Anyone outside bay area
  • Anyone who is local who works with someone outside the bay area
  • (Gayle) participation from OIT & Facilities
Outcomes
  • List some best practices, pain points and ideas from others (e.g. Github)
  • Action items to improve remote work (and someone next to each item committed to move it forward)
Discussion
Votes (8)

Front-end direction decisions

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Leads
James Forrester, Terry Chay
Schedule
1:30 pm - 60 minutes - North Side of 3rd floor
Audience
  • Front-end (HTML, CSS, Javascript) engineers
  • PMs, designers, etc. who would like front-end architectural changes
Outcomes
  1. Evaluate proposal for creation of front-end architecture group from the front-end engineering units
  2. Create model to participate and evaluate front-end related RfC or other RfCs requiring front-end input in the forthcoming architecture RfC process
  3. Evaluate the possibility of review of various RfCs
  4. Brainstorm missing front end RfCs
Discussion
  • Outcome #2 needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the results of the Architectural discussion which is to follow.
  • (List of RfCs and potential discussions to hook off this:
    • Ajax page loading for MediaWiki
    • responsive-design Grid system (separate discussion/merged with Design @ WMF discssion above)
    • Requests_for_comment/LESS CSS in core
    • CSS in templates (separate discussion)
    • HTML in mobile site rendering (separate discussion)
    • Moving language files into JSON blobs
    • Gadgets 2.0
Votes (4+3)
Front-end direction decisions (ResourceLoader, JS componentization, etc.)
Ajax page loading for MediaWiki (using mobile as a test ground)
  • +1 Jdlrobson
  • +1 DAndreescu
  • +1 JZimmerman
  • +1 ~~

QA & Testing

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Leads
Chris McMahon
Schedule
Audience
Outcomes
  • specific tools and best practices that the QA team is suggesting for front-end as well as end-to-end testing.
  • incorporate these in building our integration tests.
Discussion
Votes (6)
  • +1 Alolita, Just curious - were we planning a short session on QA and testing? It would be good to share our best practices and shortcomings.
  • +1 Jared Yes please. 
  • +1 would like to see Alolita and Jared to write outcomes
  • -1 Rob: While I think it would generally be good to have a wider conversation about QA, I think the time has run out for us to put something together about QA specifically for the tech days.  We've already got a pretty full schedule, and I don't have a clear vision about how to make such a discussion productive enough that it should divert attention from what's already on the schedule.

MediaWiki installation requirements for the future: should we start requiring Lua, Node.js etc

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion
Votes (6)

How we are doing against the goals we've set for ourselves and the board

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Leads
Howie?
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
  • Prep work for Howie's presentation on the all-staff?
  • Flow
Discussion

The main summary for the product retreat will be given at the Day 1 on the all-staff.

Votes (5)


Template CSS

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion
Votes (5)

Removing the need for HTML transformations for rendering the mobile site (Mobile web team, Parsoid, Platform ... ?!) AND turning mobile into a registered skin

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Leads
Jon Robson
Schedule
11am - 4pm, R37
Audience
Anyone interested in hacking on or otherwise discussing improvements around HTMLFormatter in MobileFrontend.
Outcomes
Next steps:
  • Get to a point where Search and Mobile are using a shared codebase

using libxml for doing transformations and this is in core to provide better visibility and maintainability

  • Explore developing a proof of concept which uses Parsoid for mobile

to provide input on the long term so that in future it's easy to switch over.

  • Get Max's patch to get parser to strip out the table of contents for

mobile and search in a state to merge into core (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/80578)

  • Mobile team need to find a short term solution using existing parser

for wrapping sections that doesn't involve regexs. This would essentially involve wrapping all sections in a DIV or SECTION tag or adding a comment and resorting to simple string replacements as suggested by Tim. Personally I'd prefer actually adding DIV's and avoid any additional parsing altogether (but let's discuss that during the next 2 days).

Discussion
Votes (7)

Deployment tool chain work

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
  • atomicity of deployments
  • splitting up language files into JSON blobs
  • instant state switching (ln -s on a directory?)
  • git-deploy
  • etc.
Discussion
Votes (4)

Hacking with TowTruck (Mozilla's real-time collab. tool) demo/discuss and WMF's overall plan for collaboration

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion
Votes (4)

Lessons learned re. mentorship programs

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion
Votes (3)

Local FLOSS communities - building your network

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion
Votes (3)

Offline VisualEditor - editing Wikipedia on a plane used to be so simple

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion
Votes ()

Lightning Talks

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion
I think this should be moved to day 2, in an open conference room.
Votes (3)

How can we successfully engage volunteers (users/editors/developers) in our online meetings (bug triages, sprint review meetings, office hours)?

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion
Votes (3)

Inter-team communication

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion
Votes (2)

Writing and maintaining translatable user documentation for features

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion
Votes (2)

How can we stop failing to review community contributed patches?

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion
Votes (2)

Help for interviewing candidates/hiring

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion
Votes (2)

Scrummaster meetup!

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Leads

Arthur Richards

Time

1600-1700

Location

R36

Audience

Scrummasters and scrummaster-like people at the WMF; other curious folks welcome

Outcomes

Since everyone will be in the same physical location, this seems like an awesome opportunity for WMF scrummasters/scrummaster-like folks to get together and discuss how things are going generally, highlight specific challenges on their team, swap stories, and generally provide one another with support. The desired outcome is that attendees leave feeling better connected with one another and that they have received sufficient support from their peers in uncovering better ways to write software.

Discussion
Votes (2)

Identifying and empowering security leads on development teams

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion

[Aa]gile, spreading lessons learned (moved to Day 2)

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Leads
Gayle
Time
Location
Audience
Team leads, product managers, and managers using or planning to use Agile proceses. (Invite has already been sent.)
Outcomes
Discussion
Will be using the appreciative inquiry approach.
Votes (0)

Narrative chalk talks about how we built important components/systems, how to hack on them

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Leads
Time
Location
Audience
Outcomes
Discussion

Real User Monitoring & Perceived latency

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Find out what we know about site performance from the perspective of readers and editors (more than you might expect!) and what we can do to make it better. Help architect the use of HTML5 performance APIs in MediaWiki.

Leads
Ori.livneh (talk) 11:13, 8 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Day 2: Free-form skillshare and hacking

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Because there was no strong consensus on a subset of these topics that lots of people wanted to learn, we'll go with freeform hacking, skillshare (marked tables/rooms indicating what people want to learn or teach), and PDF rendering hacking.