I have somehow come across this email and i wanted to say, thanks for writing it YiFei. Am glad i could be of help :)
On Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 6:00 AM YiFei Zhu zhuyifei1999@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 2:39 PM Bryan Davis bd808@wikimedia.org wrote:
After talking with both Arturo and Birgit about things we might present at Wikimania, I came up with this abstract for a talk:
Co-creating platforms and products: how the Wikimedia Cloud Services team works with the larger Wikimedia technical community to build and maintain Cloud VPS, Toolforge, Quarry, PAWS, and more
Did you know that volunteers are involved in planning, building, and maintaining the Cloud VPS and Toolforge projects as co-equals with paid staff from the Wikimedia Foundation? Since the start of the "Labs" project in 2011, one of the guiding principles for WMCS projects has been improving collaboration between Foundation staff and technical volunteers. Learn more about some of the policies and practices that are used to make this collaboration possible.
The submission would be under either the "governance" or "technology" tracks. I think it would work best as a panel discussion that is either "hybrid" (some folks in Singapore, some on-line) or pre-recorded video.
I think this is something that folks in the community might be interested in learning a bit about. I also think it would be interesting for those of us who have participated in this process to take some time to reflect on how we have worked together in the past and how we might like to see those those processes and practices evolve in the future. To make this talk work well there should be active voices from both the paid and volunteer staff involved. Towards that end, I'm mailing the cloud-admin@ list + 4 of you that I know have been active in the past in helping with Toolforge and/or Cloud VPS admin and features work to gauge your interest in participating. Thoughts?
[+ CC Petrb]
Oops forgot to reply. (I was like 'this is a long text I'll read it later' and then I forgot).
I like having this talk. I think one of the things that potential contributors may have is feeling intimidated by the complexity and that feeling of "this is too much", or that "this is something for the Foundation".
Personally, I don't remember why I started being more and more interested in the infrastructure, it may have been just curiosity. Like, when I jsub a bot task, which host executes it and how the program gets invoked. Or it might have been debugging needs, like, figuring out why my bot seems to be hanging. With the grid nodes back then, I think we could ssh into any grid exec node and observe program behavior (I don't know if this still holds true), which I think I found interesting to observe how different components interacted. I think I also talked a lot to Yuvi back in 2015 or so? I think I was developing video2commons (sorry I had to abandon this tool due to COI), and IIRC Yuvi suggested the architecture of having flask and celery, and I think during this I found web development to be pretty interesting (though I was and still am more interested in infrastructure). It was also around this time Yuvi first showed PAWS and I was kinda like 'wow how is this even possible' and I had no idea what Docker is or does. Then around the time Yuvi was leaving I was looking at a requested feature of exporting to excel sheets, so I talked to Yuvi and was like 'I kinda wish I can fix this myself' and Yuvi was like sure. So that happened. Luckily Quarry was also using flask so I got familiar with quarry architecture pretty quickly. I think I later tried to get Framawiki on board with maintaining Quarry too but I think I kinda got bored in some ways later.
I think maybe a takeaway would be that even though I was co-maintaining some cloud VPS projects like Toolforge & Quarry, it didn't mean I was doing the entire project. There are plenty of things that I didn't understand, such as the Kubernetes cluster, and I don't think I have the time and energy to like, figure everything out and maintain everything all at once (although Taavi seems to be doing this
- how they are doing it is beyond me).
I don't think I can make it to Singapore but I'm interested in hearing the talk. Depending on the time & sleep schedule maybe I could be there for the hybrid slot. Really looking forward to it.
Also CC'ed Petr, who was very active maintaining Toolforge during the 2013-2014 era.
YiFei Zhu
Bryan
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808
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