Quick update:
I've had a great experience working on our mobile apps, but it's time to
get back to core MediaWiki and help "clean my own house"... now that we've
got Mobile Apps fully staffed I'm leaving the mobile department and will be
reporting directly to Damon within WMF Engineering.
First -- huge thanks to Monte and Dan and Kristen and Dmitry and Bernd and
of course Tomasz!! and everybody else who's been awesome in Mobile Apps --
and also to the rest of the mobile team, who have become too many to list
in a concise email. :)
For the moment I'm going to get back up to speed with the Architecture
Committee and push at general MediaWiki issues. As we determine the fate of
committees and narrow down what are our priority projects, my focus may
narrow a to getting some particular things done over the next months.
A few general notes:
* Working in mobile apps reminded me how important our APIs are -- our
ability to make flexible interfaces that work in different form factors and
different technology stacks is dependent on maintaining a good API. This
needs work. :)
This doesn't just mean interacting with "api.php" -- we need clean
configuration, data, etc interfaces as well, especially if we want people
to contribute in ways other than raw text editing. There's a lot to clean
up...
* Mobile mobile mobile! I've heard some folks complain that while there's a
lot of talk about "mobile-first" and similar there aren't always concrete
explanations yet of what that means. I hope to bring some of the excitement
we've seen in Mobile about Wikidata, better queries, better visual/user
interaction design, and generally making things *work for users*.
* Breaking or working around the "PHP barrier" for third-party MediaWiki
users: I hope to get the question of services resolved one way or another
-- either by us officially dropping "shared PHP hosting" support or by
making sure we have "pure PHP" implementations of things that are required
to operate -- which is mostly dependent on having good interfaces and APIs
so that multiple implementations can be written and maintained compatibly...
* Future stuff -- new media types, narrow-field editing, natural language
queries? WHO KNOWS! I'll be researching more crazy stuff in my additional
time.
I'll see many of you at the Dev Summit soon enough -- don't be shy about
pestering me with concerns and ideas about priorities. :)
-- brion