On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 4:00 PM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
I think the way we'd want to go is roughly to have a *partnership between* the Services and Mobile teams produce and maintain the service.
(Note that the state of the art is that Mobile Apps are using Mobile Web's MobileFrontend extension as an intermediate API to aggregate & format page data -- which basically means Max has done the server-side API work for Mobile Apps so far.)
I'd expect to see Max and/or someone else from the Mobile team collaborating with the Services team to create what y'all need:
- something that does what Mobile Apps needs it to...
- and can be maintained like Services needs it to.
In general I'm in favor of more ad-hoc project-specific teams rather than completely siloing every service to the Services group, or every mobile UI to the Mobile group.
+1. This is the only thing that will scale in my opinion. "Full stack" teams involving design, front end, back end, ops, release, project management, and testing resources should be formed to work on vertical slices of functionality ("features" or "products") that are prioritized by the entire organization. Thinking that some team can be called on to fulfill all of the cross-feature/product needs is madness. Services is 3 people, MediaWiki-Core is 9 people (minus standing obligations like security and performance reviews). Teams of this size cannot be expected to service all the "backend" needs of the myriad product/feature verticals that are under the WMF umbrella. If we don't have enough people to staff projects this way we are trying to do too many things at once. (Which I'm pretty sure is actually the case.)
Bryan