Thanks for the feedback!
On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 11:39 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Guillaume,
Since I have a good case of insomnia and am reading emails between attempts to sleep:
As a "team practice" for remotes, I would suggest scheduling coffee breaks just like people do in person, but chat on Hangouts.
That sounds like a good idea, I might try that.
Don't even try to assimilate 100% of IRC traffic. And if IRC distracts you from Getting Things Done, minimize it and only look if pinged.
I'm not trying to assimilate 100% (I do not think anybody can assimilate that much!). But just understanding which 1% I should assimilate is already a challenge at the moment. This sounds like a NP-complete problem (though I do not have the formal proof yet).
For some cultural context: Gerrit has its critics. Awhile back I believe that Isaara suggested burning it "in a huge fire".
That's an issue of me not being used to this way of working more than anything else (at least I think). It's always fun to see new ways of doing things. Makes me challenge what I've been doing for so long...
Please write the blog post that you mentioned!
Glad to have you with us,
Pine
On Feb 17, 2016 01:50, "Guillaume Lederrey" glederrey@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello team!
I've been with you for 2 weeks. As Tomasz suggested, I might be the right moment to list what I have discovered so far. I'm trying to point out the difference I see from what I'm used to, not to judge (yet), I don't have enough context for that... Still I am biased by my previous experience and that will show up below...
I need to unlearn a few things. It seems that last week, each and every decision I took has been challenged by someone (usually for good reasons). Things that I take for granted as "the right way (tm)" are actually done in a fairly different way here. Examples:
== Distributed team ==
** my belief ** It is hard to be part of a distributed team.
** what happens at WMF ** You've all been extremely welcoming! Having the chance to see you in person in SF in January definitely helps (it is a bit harder for me to find my way around the Ops team, probably in part because I have not had the chance to meet them in person). The fact that we also have kind of informal conversations (IRC, unmeeting, ...) helps to belong. It seems to me that you've made all the necessary effort to include me.
** comments ** I still have to make an effort to get in touch when I need to. I'm so used to coffee breaks where you take time to discuss whatever needs discussing. IRC feels more intrusive as it is a continuous flow, not a set time where you go have coffee and do the needful... I also need to learn to ignore IRC interruptions. It still feels that I might miss something important and that there is just too much information sometimes...
== Versionning ==
**my belief ** anything deployed must have a version number
** what happens at WMF **
- deployments on labs are pretty much free-form, cherry pick whatever
you want on puppetmaster
- deployments on prod seems to have version numbers at least for
mediawiki code, puppet code is deployed directly from production branch
** comments ** Having clear version numbers implies having a conscious decision of creating a version, potentially with the appropriate checks of the content of that version, additional testing. It allows to have a clear separation between creating a version and promoting it to production. Not having versions everywhere allows for more flexibility and puts responsibility of making the right choices more on the people than on the process. Probably a good thing if you have smart enough people (and WMF seems to have a pretty smart crowd).
Having a shared git repository on deployment-puppetmaster scares the hell out of me! I'm so used to preparing anything I want to push locally and then just applying a specific tag / version...
== Cherry-picking ==
** my belief ** cherry-picking is bad and should be used only as a last resort solution
** what happens at WMF **
- cherry picking is the norm
- this seems to be influenced by Gerrit, which promotes cherry picking
and single commits patches
** comment ** I'm all for rewriting git history to make it more readable, to help tell the story of what is happening to the code. I think that branches and merges are a good tool for that. Cherry picking fixes from one branch to the next leaves a lot of opportunities to forget one. Merging helps tell the story of "those are all the fixes done on branch X, I've applied them on branch X+1". Also, I'm not a huge fan of gerrit idea of changes being a single commit. Having a coherent change split in multiple phases make sense to me (for example: 1) preliminary refactoring, 2) my actual work 3) some clean up I did along the way). I need to dig deeper into topic branchs and how they integrate with gerrit (yes, I am brand new to gerrit).
It also seems that all this cherry picking creates much more flexibility (I can take any commit and apply it anywhere). Again, giving control back to the human and not to the tool.
== Stupid code is good code ==
I need to write a blog post about this one, but like Kernighan said "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" [1]. Looking at our code (mainly puppet at the moment), I think there are quite a few places where we do the smart thing, when stupid would be sufficient. That's probably the cost of hiring smart people ...
== A few random points ==
- We have an incredible amount of documentation. It is easy to read
(I've been drawn into it and lost much time). It is also outdated in some place (documentation always is).
- so many different ways to deploy (puppet, trebuchet, salt, manual stuff,
...)
- I still have not found a global architecture schema (something like
a high level component or deplyoment diagram). But I have never seen any company having those...
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