[Wikitech-l] Tool Labs and my new job at WMF

I recently transferred from the Reading Infrastructure team to the Community Tech team [0]. The move happened because I want to spend more of my time working with the developers who build tools and bots to help the Wikimedia communities. I've been thinking about needs of the Tool Labs developers for a while, and in November I finally wrote up a proposal about a job focused on this work [1]. I was ready for a lengthy discussion with management to defend my ideas about this need, but to my surprise the feedback I got instead was mostly "it's about time" and "when can you start?". My draft position proposal is now "official" and posted on meta [2]. This project will be my major focus on the Community Tech team, but I will also be helping out with code review, deployments, and other things that the rest of the team is working on. People watching wikitech, labs-l, and Phabricator may have noticed that I have been poking at various things since January like a redesign of the wikitech main page [3], a new namespace for tool documentation [4], and generally being more active in discussing problems and possible solutions. Now that I am working on these issues full time I want to start talking about bigger issues. I have drafted a "vision" document on meta [5] describing some of the larger issues with Tool Labs (and Labs and wikitech) that are making things harder than they could be. This vision comes with a straw dog project roadmap that I think we could work towards. This is not a set in stone timeline, but rather a very high level description of a series of projects that I believe would move Tool Labs towards being an easier environment for collaborative FLOSS projects to thrive in. I will continue to refine these project ideas and create Phabricator tasks to track them, but before I dive too deeply into that I would like to solicit input on both the problems and the general solution roadmap. The project page is on meta rather than wikitech to make it easier for existing Wikimedians who aren't wikitech users to participate. The talk page is open for comments [6] and I look forward to hearing about problems and solutions that I have not yet imagined. I hope that as the various sub-projects solidify some of you will join me in getting the work done. [0]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Staff_and_contra… [1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:BDavis_%28WMF%29/Projects/Tool_Labs_sup… [2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Tool_Labs_support [3]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page [4]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tool_Labs_tools [5]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Tool_Labs_support/Tool_Labs_… [6]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Tech/Tool_Labs_support/Tool_… Bryan -- Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd808(a)wikimedia.org> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855