On Mar 24, 2015 10:45 PM, "Rob Lanphier" <robla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi folks,
First things first: I'm not burying the lede in this email, so if you
aren't interested in the inner workings of WMF's Platform Engineering
team,
feel free to ignore the rest of this. :-)
We're making a few changes effective in April for Platform Engineering,
which you all care deeply about because you're still reading.
We're looking to give the teams a little more clarity of scope.
Previously, among other teams in Platform Engineering, we had a large
MediaWiki Core team, and a smaller Multimedia team. We played a big game
of musical chairs, and everyone from those teams is part of a new team.
Additionally, the Parsoid team got into the fun, getting a new member as a
result.
-
Performance - This team is shooting for all page views in under 1000ms
<
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MtDBNTH1g7CZzhwlJ1raEJagA8qM3uoV7ta…
.
The team plans to establish key frontend and backend performance
metrics
and assume responsibility for their curation and
upkeep, and get a
handle
on web page rendering performance. Right now,
it's all about
VisualEditor,
but over time, this is going to be a more
generalized function.
-
Members: Ori Livneh, Gilles Dubuc (soon!), now hiring!
-
Availability - Make MediaWiki backend failures diminishingly
infrequent,
and prevent end users from noticing the ones that
do by making
recovery as
easy and automated as possible. This team does ops
facing work that
contributes to the overall stability and maintainability of the system.
Things like multi-datacenter support, and migrating off of outdated
technology to newer, more reliable tech.
-
Members: Aaron Schulz and Gilles Dubuc (for now, until he wraps up
work on multi datacenter)
-
MediaWiki API - This team's goal wil be make user interface
innovation+evolution easier and make life easier for our sites' robot
overlords by making all business logic for MediaWiki available via well
specified API. Some APIs will be in PHP and some external over HTTP
depending on the needs of other teams.
-
Members: Brad Jorsch, Kunal Mehta, Gergo Tisza, Mark Holmquist. Stas
Malyshev plans to join this team when his work on Wikidata Query
wraps up. Bryan
Davis plans to join as soon as his role as interim Product Manager
for
Platform wraps up.
-
Search - Provide unique and highly relevant search results on
Wikimedia
sites, increasing the value of our content to
readers and providing
tools
that help editors make our content better. The team
will continue
working
on existing backlog of the
CirrusSearch/Elasticsearch bugs and
improvements, plus Wikidata Query
-
Members: Nik Everett, Stas Malyshev (for now...), James Douglas,
also
now hiring!
-
Security - making life hard for the people that want to do harm to our
sites or the people that use them.
-
Members: Chris Steipp, also now hiring!
-
Programs support - support our non-tech programs with tools that
delight
our users and maintain the privacy and security of
our community,
providing
infrastructure for things like Wikimania
scholarships, grant program
applications, and ContactForm.
-
Members: Niharika Kohli, Bryan Davis(20%)
-
Parsing (renamed from "Parsoid") - There are a number of changes to our
PHP parser that would make things easier for VisualEditor and Parsoid,
while at the same time offering a more powerful and easy-to-use
authoring
environment for our editors (even those using
wikitext). Having Tim
on a
rebranded “Parsing” team gives that team agency to
start evolving
wikitext
again, in a way that is supported by Parsoid HTML
from day one.
-
Members: Existing Parsoid team (Subbu Sastry, Marc Ordinas i Llopis,
Arlo Brenault, and C. Scott Ananian), plus (new) Tim Starling
You'll notice that some of these teams are pretty small, especially given
their scope. This is likely to be at least a little fluid for a while as
we make sure we have the balance of work right and as we figure out the FY
2015-16 budget.
Let us know if you have any questions about this. I say "us" because I'll
actually be traveling shortly. Feel free to ask the individual members of
the teams what's up, or if you don't know who to go to, Bryan Davis will
be
filling in for my duties while I'm out.
Thanks
Rob
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Thanks for sending this, its always good to be able to figure out who is
working on what.
Does this mean there will no longer be a multimedia team/nobody responsible
or working on what the multimedia team was working on previously?
--bawolff