[QA] pair programming with Zeljko

[Baochuan Lu]

Hello everyone:

I had a pairing session with Zeljko for an hour this morning (6am CDT
11/4/14).

We learned more about each other's background and talked about ideas and
expectations.

I got involved with mediawiki project because I teach computer science and
enjoy coding in general. More importantly I believe open source projects
provide a great teaching and learning environment to teachers and students
alike. I am actively involved with the teaching open source project
<http://teachingopensource.org/> (the site is powered by mediawiki). This
semester I am advising four graduating seniors in our computer science
program on their senior project (9-month long). Their goal is to learn
about the mediawiki project and seek to make meaningful contributes.
Usually a senior project has an external sponsor, who serves as the client
by providing business requirements. For this particular project students
are required to find ideas they want work on themselves. Due to our limited
experience with mediawiki we have been "productively lost" for two months.
Recently I was reminded that we ought to reach out to the community for
help. So I started asking around on #wikimedia-dev and found the pair
programming opportunity. My goal is to learn as much as I can so I can
advise my students effectively.

Zeljko mentioned that even though the pair programming for fun and profit
program has been discontinued he would willing chat with me and the
students on a weekly basis to help guide them. This offer is beyond my
expectation. I am very excited about this partnership opportunity. Zeljko
also mentioned that my students might be interested in the three month long
internships with the Wikimedia Foundation. I will definitely pass the
information on to my students. Zeljko's mention of programs like Google
Summer of Code and GCI reminds me that wikimedia's projects in such
programs may give us some hints on the type of doable tasks that needs to
be done.

In the second half of the hour Zeljko demonstrated a typical workflow for
fixing bugs. He used an example bug (missing space character after a comma)
on gerrit. He showed me how to use rubocop to identify/verify the bug and
auto-correct the bug with rubocop, and then he fixed the bug on a branch
and committed the fix for review on gerrit.

I learned a great deal today and look forward to our next pairing session.
In the meantime I will polish up my skills with Ruby and the tool chain
used by wikimedia.

Please let me know If anyone of you on this list can think of anything that
would be helpful to the students.

Thanks,
Baochuan
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