Hey folks!
I have been promising this discussion for a whole month. Rather than
add a "ps I still haven't had this conversation" note to this week's
progress report to the mailing list I'm going to start this thread. :)
First I would like to thank all of you for the help you have provided
to the project so far. You may or may not see your interactions with
Srishti and I on irc, email, phabricator, or gerrit as having been
meaningful, but they were! Even beyond the tangible support, knowing
that we can reach out to each of you individually or as a group has
helped to alleviate stress about making many decisions.
I do however feel badly that I have not yet found ways to have each of
you be more meaningfully involved in shaping the project on a week to
week basis. The majority of you are here to offer advice on the user
facing aspects of the project, and although we are making a lot of
progress we really are just starting to get to these important UI and
workflow components. Our roadmap for the rest of this quarter
(January-March 2021) includes edit screens and search screens that I
hope many of you will have opinions about. Patrolling workflows will
be work that we take up in the April-June quarter along with
finalizing production deployment plans and getting sign off from the
Foundation's Security and SRE groups on the project.
I would really like to see all of you stay and get to these upcoming
milestones with us. That being said, I also want to give all of you a
chance to step back and focus on other things if this does not feel
like a good use of your time.
What are your feelings? Are you ready to continue this experiment for
another 5 months until we reach launch? Do you have any requests for
changes that would help you feel more engaged and useful in your
advisory role?
Please feel free to reply on list or only to me as you feel is
appropriate. Radical transparency is fun, but I also know that sharing
feelings in a publicly logged mailing list can be intimidating at
times.
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808
Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the week ending 2021-01-29.
See the on-wiki progress report [0] for additional details and clickable links.
== TL;DR ==
* Direct tool registration core API built
* OpenAPI documentation improved for complex fields
* Initial RTL review completed
* A handful of miscellaneous fixes committed
Having the core toolinfo write API merged unblocks a large amount of
UI work to add screens for creating and editing tools. While that work
starts we will be making additional enhancements to the backend
storage and API to track version history for tools and allow wiki-like
views of past revisions and diffs between revisions. We expect the
work needed to implement these features to be greatly accelerated by
copying implementation details from the Striker project which has this
functionality for it's toolinfo.json objects.
Bryan and Srishti will be presenting an overview of Toolhub to the
Wikimedia Foundation staff on 2021-02-04 as part of the Foundation's
monthly staff meeting. We should be able to publish the slides from
that talk on meta as well to provide folks in the larger Wikimedia
community with the same overview.
[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/Progress_reports/2021-01-29
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808
Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the week ending 2021-01-22.
See the on-wiki progress report [0] for additional details and clickable links.
== TL;DR ==
* A central notification service is under review in gerrit
* Niklas checked in to see how our integration with TWN is progressing
* Toolhub API OAuth auth server UI work is in progress
* RTL implementation is ready for feedback
Tasks have been progressing a bit slower in the last two weeks as
Srishti and Bryan have been pulled into work outside of the Toolhub
project. This is normal and something we have expected in our capacity
planning for the quarter.
For the 3rd week in a row, Bryan has not managed to discuss the
ongoing role of the advisory council in building and testing Toolhub.
:((
[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/Progress_reports/2021-01-22
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808
Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the week ending 2021-01-15.
See the on-wiki progress report [0] for additional details and clickable links.
== TL;DR ==
* Toolhub API OAuth auth server UI work is in progress
* Bryan and Srishti discussing creating a "Definition of done"
* Direct tool registration backend work starting
* Mukunda Modell interested in helping with faced search
The Foundation's fiscal year 2020/2021 Q3 is well underway. We are
currently working on the OAuth features which were originally planned
for Q2. Work should transition towards direct registration soon. Along
the way we are also thinking more and more about lightweight but
effective processes to help ensure that the codebase is well
architected and fits the needs of its users.
Bryan still owes the advisory council some discussion of their ongoing
role in building and testing Toolhub. :(
[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/Progress_reports/2021-01-15
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808
Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the week ending 2021-01-08.
See the on-wiki progress report [0] for additional details and clickable links.
== TL;DR ==
* Translatewiki.org integration complete for UI messages
* Lots of localization improvements (17 gerrit change sets)
* User interface updates
* First js unit tests added
* January-March 2021 project goals published
This week marks the start of a new quarter of work at the Wikimedia
Foundation. Looking back at the work that we have accomplished in Q2
(October-December 2020), we have come a very long way! At the start of
October 2020 we had a plan for how work would proceed, but the
application itself was a placeholder Django backend with no user
interface. Today we have a functional frontend and backend with
several major features implemented. We have also migrated the project
from a personal repo on GitHub to Wikimedia's Gerrit server and
integrated it with the Wikimedia continuous integration
infrastructure. We even have a live demo server which will allow us to
get feedback on our progress from a wider group of people.
Both Srishti and I have learned a lot about Vue development. I also
accidentally learned quite a bit about the internals of Blubber while
implementing 2 feature patches to extend it to better support a
project like Toolhub. Srishti and I are both happy with the choices of
Django, Vue, and Vuetify that they made in the planning phase of the
project, and feel confident that building the more complex features
planned for Q3 (January-March 2021) will proceed smoothly.
I would like to thank all of you who have been following along and
helping answer questions for us. I hoped to have already started a
discussion on this list about the role of the advisory council during
the new calendar year, but time has gotten away from me this week. I
will try harder next week! :)
[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/Progress_reports/2021-01-08
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808
Hey folks,
Mukunda Modell joined our mailing list today. For those of you who
don't know him, Mukunda works at the Wikimedia Foundation as part of
the Release Engineering team. Among the many things he does within
RelEng, Mukunda is the Foundation's local expert on Phabricator
internals and deployment. He writes extensions for Phab, takes care of
actually deploying new upstream releases, and helps folks find ways to
make Phab work for more complicated use cases like handling security
tickets.
Prior to joining the Foundation Mukunda worked at Deviant Art, and
that is actually related to his reason for joining us. At DA Mukunda
worked on a faceted search system similar to the one we plan to build
into Toolhub. Mukunda reached out to me after hearing a presentation I
gave on Toolhub that included some talk about facet search. He is
interested in consulting with us on that feature, and maybe I'll be
able to nerd snipe him into help with some coding too. :)
Everyone, please do remember that this list is a part of the Wikimedia
technical spaces and thus covered by the
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct>. The archives of the
list are also publicly available, so keep that in mind as well when
posting here. As long as we stick to the topic of the list, developing
Toohub, I think everyone will be fine. :)
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808