Greetings all,
I'm pleased to announce that the mobile team has a new team member.
Jon Robson joins Yuvi, Patrick, Arthur, Phil, and Andre as a core
member of the mobile team. In this role he'll provide the team with
the strong front end development skills that we've been needing.
Jon joins us from Osmosoft, a small open source web development team
from BT, the UK's biggest telecommunication provider. Jon has spent
just over 4 years working on various BT projects as well as being a
core contributor in the open source projects TiddlyWiki [1], TiddlyWeb
[2] and TiddlySpace [3] mainly as a client side developer but also
working with Python and even fulfilling sys-admin duties! Jon is
excited to join us after dissolving many of BT's open source myths
despite times of being exposed to the full wrath of enterprise
software [4] during his time in the corporate world [5].
He'll be working remotely from the UK for the first couple of months
and we'll hopefully see him in San Francisco after. The mobile team
stil has a couple of hires left so don't hesitate to send candidates
our way.
Welcome Jon!
[1] http://tiddlywiki.com
[2] http://tiddlyweb.com/
[3] http://tiddlyspace.com
[4] https://twitter.com/#!/rakugojon/status/156720382542479360
[5] https://twitter.com/#!/rakugojon/status/144398575890219008
--tomasz
* Jon Robson (jdlrobson) recently joined the Wikimedia Foundation mobile
team as a contractor to work on front-end software development.
* Kelly Anne Johnson (kellyanne), an OmniTI UI designer, will be working
on the Article Feedback Tool project along with that team.
* Audrey Tang (au), working on Parsoid as a volunteer and soon to start
as a part-time contractor. Yes, it's
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang .
All got extensions access (although this is going to be a somewhat
meaningless distinction in our git future).
Welcome, all!
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
I finally have a tutorial on MediaWiki Skinning for 1.18+ online on
Redwerks' Blog.
http://blog.redwerks.org/2012/02/08/mediawiki-skinning-tutorial/
The tutorial covers the general conceptual areas of a skin, laying out the
files for a skin, all the small boilerplate pieces used to output types of
content, an overview of things you should test for in your skin when
implemented, a bit on i18n and related info on variants and rtl, and a
touch on accessibility.
--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
Reminder that the deadline to apply for a Wikimania 2012 travel scholarship
is February 16 (23:59 UTC). We encourage you to apply! We need developers
and tech folks at Wikimania, including for the hackathon, the technical
track, workshops and more. :)
http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships
Full travel scholarships, funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and chapters
(France, UK, Israel, Austria), will cover transportation, hostel
accommodations, and conference registration. Partial scholarships are also
offered by WMF (and Wikimedia Hungary).
Wikimania 2012 will take place July 12-15 at the George Washington
University in Washington, DC. Wikimania hackathon is July 10-11. The call
for participation is also open now (deadline: March 18), and registration
is open.
Cheers,
Katie
Hi everyone,
I'm pleased to welcome a new member of our analytics engineering team.
David Schoonover starts today in the San Francisco office[1] as our
new Systems Engineer for Data Analytics. David previously worked
remotely for a company in McLean, VA in Virginia's Silicon...thing
(not valley, forest or alley...what do they call it? "Silicon road to
Dulles"?). Anyway, David's work was at Clearspring, the company
responsible for the AddThis sharing widget that's installed across 10+
million domains servicing 60k+ requests per second. He and a
co-worker built a scalable real-time analytics system to power the
Share Count feature of their tools, which is part of a real-time
dashboard you get as a user of their service.
In addition to David's talent in database technology and software
engineering, David also adds to our growing team of capable
photographers in Platform Engineering. Because, after all, every good
engineering organization should have plenty of great photographers.
I've also found David will immediately will draw a dinosaur[2] on a
whiteboard in whatever room he is in. So, those of you in our SF
office, if you see a plesiosaur on the whiteboard near you, that
probably means he's been there recently. Or maybe it's been there a
while but now won't erase. Either way, he probably drew it.
David will be joining Andrew Otto and Erik Zachte in the analytics
group in Platform Engineering, working very closely with Diederik van
Liere from Howie's new Product Management team. David, Andrew and
Diederik (along with contractor Fabian Kaelin) are working on fixing
up our reporting pipeline and report card.
Welcome David!
Rob
[1] Yes, that's right, I've actually hired another person in San
Francisco, and this time, I didn't have to convince him to move here.
When I have team meetings, I'll have to get a conference room with
THREE chairs. And a good phone.
[2] Dinosaur samples: http://art.less.ly/dinosaurs/
Hi folks,
I would like to notify you that based on discussion between huggle
developers, we created a new mailing list huggle(a)lists.wikimedia.org.
It's for people who seek help or support for huggle, tool which is being
used on a number of wikimedia projects and for developer talk, important
changes will be announced there as well as beta versions, it's primarily
for huggle project members and the support for the tool. Anyone is welcome
to subscribe to this list. In case you have any questions, please ask!
Thank you
Unless you've been living under a rock (If you have, how's the wifi under
there?) we're moving to git soon. Along with this will come a change in how
we do code review. However, some people have expressed concerns over the
usability of gerrit. Therefore I'd like to propose an alternative.
Phabricator is a code review tool written by and for Facebook that has
been open sourced. For an introduction, see this:
http://phabricator.com/docs/phabricator/article/Introduction.html
I've written up some documentation about Phabricator for our uses here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator
I would really like for some of our developers and reviewers to try this
out as an alternative to gerrit. Personally I've found it much more
pleasurable to work with than gerrit. If we think this might be a viable
solution for us then I'd be willing to work on adding more integration
(LDAP support and Unit testing integration).
Let me know if you have any questions or feedback. Thanks!
--
John
John DuHart has embarked on a complete rewrite of the current Mobile
Frontend extension, and has decided to name it 'MobileFrontend2'.
While we would prefer it if we could work cooperatively to resolve the
existing open issues in the current MobileFrontend extension and maintain
continuity. It's understandable why John would prefer to
undertake his complete rewrite.
(See
Extension_talk:MobileFrontend#Issues_with_MobileFrontend_and_possible_rewrite_11940<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:MobileFrontend#Issues_with_Mo…>
)
However, we feel that naming the rewrite 'MobileFrontend2' is problematic
as users have already started to confuse it with the current extension.
One thought was to name it to MobileSkin, but it appears that this
extension already exists and we quickly reverted that rename attempt.
We're curious to hear the rest of the engineering community's perspective
and try to gain some consensus as to how best to proceed.
— The Mobile Team
John, Patrick, and anyone else who is interested in the MobileFrontend
extension:
John Du Hart is working on a rewrite, aiming to make it less Wikimedia
Foundation-centric, and there is disagreement regarding whether his
rewrite is desired. Please read and comment:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:MobileFrontend#Issues_with_Mo…
(Can someone please forward this to mobile-l as well? Thanks.)
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
Hey Devs,
I'm Lakmal ,a final year undergraduate in University of Moratuwa ,Sri Lanka
who is interested about participating in GSoc 2012 summer programme with
WikiMedia Foundation . I already downloaded, and installed mediawiki and
hoping to start with some small
bugs<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Annoying_little_bug>to make my self
familiar with the code base.
After going through the suggested idea list from the community ,I developed
a good interest in the above mentioned project where the final outcome
would be set of plugins for MediaWiki to communicate with common photo
management APIs ( Etc ,iPhoto ,Lightroom ..) .
I would be grateful if one of you can fill me up with the current status of
this project idea . In the sense I would like to know whether someone is
already working on this or this is sill open for an enthusiast to start
working on :) .
I believe this is the right mailing list to ask this question ,if not I
apologize and would expect someone to direct me to the correct place .
--
Thanks & Kind Regards
Lakmal Padmakumara
Undergraduate
Computer Science and Engineering Department
University of Moratuwa
Sri Lanka
http://srilankatechnology.blogspot.com/