Hi Everyone,
Thank you for participating in the local development environment interviews! I was able to get a much better idea of what changes could give you the highest impact in terms of satisfaction as we move to create a development environment that more closely matches production while being mindful of your needs.
Here are the most common issues I found:
- You’d like an environment that is simple to use and easy to set up, and doesn’t require much maintenance from you. - You get lost in the documentation, or sometimes can’t find it, and assistance isn’t readily available when things go wrong. - You also find your current environment takes up too many resources and runs too slowly. - You have a hard time managing your environment configuration(s). - You can find it difficult to share your work with other parties
The most requested features were:
- Production-like test/dev environments - Real content
You can find more details on the Mediawiki Developer Satisfaction page[0].
Initially, I (and others) will be working on a local development environment to address these problems. This will be a gradual and iterative effort, so not all issues will be solved right away. I hope to release it to a group of testers as soon as we have made sufficient progress.
We plan to try a Docker/Kubernetes based implementation, possibly building upon preexisting works. If you have ideas you’d like to share, please feel free to discuss them on the talk page[1].
If you have any concerns, please let me know.
[0]. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Satisfaction [1]. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Developer_Satisfaction
Jeena
On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 2:14 PM Jeena Huneidi jhuneidi@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello Everyone,
I am working on improving developer productivity! Specifically, I am aiming to improve the local development environment.
Satisfaction with the local development environment got the second lowest score in the developer satisfaction survey, and we (Release Engineering) would like to find out which things about it you like, and which are troublesome. In order to do so, we need your help! I’d love to have the opportunity to interview you about your local setup and/or observe how you interact with it.
Please send me an email if you’d like to participate, and I or one of my colleagues will schedule some time with you.
I’m looking forward to our conversations. This is a chance for you to shape the local development environment, so please don’t hold back :)
Outcomes resulting from the interviews (non personally identifiable information) will be made available after analysis has been completed.
-- Jeena Huneidi Software Engineer, Release Engineering Wikimedia Foundation