David Gerard wrote:
So how does it feel like it's going now that
it's technically your job?
The main difference is I'm able to spend less time on other clients and
more time on Wikimedia/MediaWiki without worrying about being sent to
debtor's prison. ;)
(I'm interested in terms of comparisons to ideas
like bounty systems, which
are widely advocated but I've never seen actually being very functional.
I'm suspecting the way to get lots of good work out of a hacker is to make
it an actual job then trust them to do it. This requires picking one's
hacker carefully.)
Well, I have worked on some specific things that I might not have
otherwise (the update service), and some other useful side software
(getting Kate's lucene search fixed up), but mostly I'm just still
banging away on general MediaWiki maintenance, the future-proofing
schema rework, and such. Some of it's boring, I suppose, but I was
already mostly doing that sort of boring stuff.
It seems hard to get newbies excited about maintenance, code cleanup,
validating output, security, schema efficiency. Everybody wants to do
new features, new interfaces, add an extra preference...
Maybe bounties for specific tasks can work, maybe they won't. I really
haven't seen any actually in effect.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)