Welcome, Stef!

We are welcoming Stef Dunlap to the Abstract Wikipedia team! Stef joins us as a Quality and Test Engineer. She will be instrumental in ensuring that Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia, which are complex systems spanning several MediaWiki projects, will be testable. This is expected to increase our development velocity overall.

Stef received her Bachelor of Science in Computer & Information Science from Purdue University in Indianapolis, the capital of Indiana in the USA in 2012. She has since worked for small- and medium-sized startups with a focus on improving team engineering processes and testing practices. On Wikipedia, her username is Motevets. We’ll let Stef introduce with her own words:

“I'm very excited to be joining the Wikimedia Foundation as a Staff Software Engineer in Test. My approach to software engineering has been strongly influenced by my time at Pivotal which had three core values: "do the right thing, do what works, and be kind." I've seen that teams that can combine ethics, pragmatism, and empathy are the kinds of teams that make great software and foster a strong community around them.

“I live in Toronto, ON with my loving partner and two cats. In my free time, I like to make things; with computers, 3D printers, and paper. I enjoy contributing to English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons by finding images for articles that have none. On more than one occasion, this has involved me reaching out to owners of copyrighted images that would be good fits for articles, explaining Wikimedia's mission, the reason Wikipedia prefers free images, and (if they're comfortable) arranging them to release it under a free license so that it can be published to Commons and Wikipedia.”

Please join me in welcoming Stef to the Abstract Wikipedia team!

Workstream updates for the week of October 7

Experience workstream

• [Tests] POC integration test with Jest: use case 1 “create a new function” (T316669)
• Fix function editor: aliases field fixes: T317961
• Aliases component improvements: T318148
• [Design] Discussed adding Implementation and Tester tabs back into function flow
• [Design review + changes] Function definition on mobile
• Document and unify docs about CUJs (T316668)
• Critical User Journeys reflected as phabricator epics
• Fix initialize object with edge case url params (T311416)

Metadata workstream

• Added backend server id(s) to metadata (T314960)
• Drafted and published a wiki page documenting function call metadata (T313567)
• Investigated providing readable summaries of more error types (T312611)
• Switched Z820/Trigger meta-data to cope with ZMap-based meta-data (T309642)
• Adjusted ZTypedPair PHP to use K1/K2 not Z882K1/Z882K2 (T315009)
• Adjusted ZTypedList PHP to validate additions when expanded (T315696)

Natural language generation workstream

• Refined the template language specification
• Abstract Representation Discussion Part III (e.g., refine the definition of constructor, refine the initial proposal, etc.)
• Contributed to the Architectural Review document
• Extended the prototype to generate text about a topic in Wikidata (e.g. stub-like)
• Published the DIFF article re: current state of NLG system