State of Wikifunctions January 2023
Where are we?
Since this is our 100th Update newsletter, and it's also a good way to start 2023, we wanted to give a general overview of the status of the project, and what is left to do before we launch.
Last year, we saw major progress. We launched the Wikifunctions Beta, and saw some engagement there - thank you for everyone trying it out! We also had the participation of the Google.org fellows, which led to some reshuffling of our work to accommodate the limited availability of specific skills. It was a busy year!
Wikifunctions already provides a large number of features:
- Users can call functions
- Wikifunctions allows running implementations in Python and in JavaScript
- Wikifunctions allows composing implementations from functions which ultimately are written in different programming languages
- Wikifunctions allows for user-defined types and user-defined validators for these types
- Contributors can create instances of user-defined and pre-built types and store them on-wiki
- There is an easy-to-use workflow for creating functions
- Generic types and generic functions are supported by the backend, allowing for powerful implementations
- Functions can have several implementations, and the backend selects an implementation to run for a given function call
- Test cases are run against the given implementations
- The community can approve and deactivate individual implementations and test cases, providing a mechanism for the community to work out what each function exactly means
- The whole frontend is fully multi-lingual, and supports showing and editing labels in hundreds of languages
- The site works both on desktop and mobile. We're excited to provide an environment where mobile users can benefit from and also create functions.
- Various metadata are collected when a function runs, and made available in the UI
Just two weeks ago, my eight year old daughter was asking me what I was working on, and I gave her a quick tour of Wikifunctions. I showed her the reverse function on Wikifunctions, and she thoroughly enjoyed coming up with seemingly meaningless strings to enter into Wikifunctions, run the function, and make the system display bad words to us.
The last few weeks we have been focusing on rescheduling and reprioritizing features in order to quickly move toward launch.
We are currently in the middle of designing and implementing our user experience. You can see the changes that have landed, and the changes we are working on in the two pairs of screenshots below.
For now, you can get a preview of the new object viewer and contrast it with the current object viewer on the Beta. The interactive features on complex objects are especially interesting to play around with and compare. This view is in heavy development right now.
We have also landed a major patch for persistent caching of test results, which will help with some major performance issues that many Beta visitors may have noticed. Moreover, it will soon enable another major step: based on the metadata of the test results, the backend will start selecting better performing implementations. Whereas currently it is selecting an implementation randomly, in the near future it will be considerably smarter than that.
What is left?
What are the main pieces of work we hope to do before we launch Wikifunctions?
- ensure that function evaluation always runs correctly; there are a few stubborn edge cases left to be addressed (current phase, θ, Goal 2)
- complete the design and implementation of the user experience, so that readers and contributors have a pleasant experience using Wikifunctions (current phase, θ, Goals 5, 9 and 10)
- create and manage user rights relevant to Wikifunctions, as there are a few new rights that the current wikis don’t have (current phase, θ, Goal 6)
- display edit history / diffs, so it becomes possible to understand changes in the wiki (current phase, θ, Goal 6)
- fixing a few issues with error reporting (next phase, ι)
- provide a language switcher for the website, so that users can use and read Wikifunctions in their own language (next phase, ι)
- collect metrics that will help us to understand how Wikifunctions develops, and to recognize opportunities and bottlenecks in the system (next phase, ι)
- get search working, to help folks find their way around (next phase, ι)
- enable users to write documentation for their own functions, to explain their functions and foster their use (next phase, ι)
There is still plenty of work to do. You can follow the progress either on the Beta, where we run the newest development version, or through these updates, where we will continue to report on our progress.
Looking forward to 2023!
Development update (as of January 13, 2023)
- Major progress on Goal 4 (Implementing the Function view). In a closing event, we closed two of the three Critical User Journeys (here and here) associated with this Goal, and identified the remaining tasks for this Goal. Since then, all but one could be closed and the last one is in review. We’re very likely to close this last Critical User Journey on this Goal next week, including Goal 4 itself too.
- The Experience workstream has appropriately shifted to Goal 5 mostly (Implementing the default object viewer). This week we saw the design for lists being locked in, and the first parts land.
- In Goal 3 (Meta-data) we only have three tasks left! A major patch, which has been cooking since the summer, has finally hit the review, and which will considerably improve the performance characteristics of the system.
- We had the first volunteer’s corner of the year. We used Jitsi this time (but couldn’t use the Foundation instance), and we had seven volunteers attending. The session was lively and had numerous questions, and we hope to recruit a new volunteer developer to our wider ecosystem.