Hi Taavi,

Thanks for this awesome writeup, and your contributions to the stack!

I wanted to share that recent polling and consensus gathering within WMF's Product Engineering unit also mirrors your insights. Beta Cluster / development rig challenges surfaced as the most important engineering priority area where Product Engineering is interested to help.

There seems to be shared sentiment here, as we've also observed signals in developer satisfaction surveys [1].

Coincidentally, we're aiming to assemble something of a strike force to begin its work sometime (TBD) in the Wikimedia Foundation's Q3 (January 2023 - March 2023). The idea is to spend 2-3 months initially to see how much traction we can get with an initial plan. Product Engineering management and some tech leads will be meeting over the course of the next several weeks to determine approach for enlisting Product Engineering talent in addressing issues, in concert with our colleagues in the WMF Technology department and elsewhere.

We'd be very interested to collaborate. I'll follow up off thread to see if there may be ways we can better connect.

Thanks again! And I'd also like to express appreciation for the cool things going on with mwcli and Patchdemo I think we're seeing some pretty good hints at ways we might gain better assurance about reproducibility with less effort expended in daily engineering life.

Heads up, I'm on break next week to spend time with family, and will be catching up on my inbox upon return.

Respectfully,

Adam Baso (he/him/his/Adam)
Director of Engineering
Product Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation


[1] cf. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Satisfaction_Survey/2021/Trends

I also see your reference to the Beta Cluster survey.