Thank you for this email. I appreciate your effort to tackle difficult
problems head on and in recognizing our problems are socio-technical, not
just technical. This email is probably one of the most reassuring things I
have read from someone in WMF management in a very long time. There were
some p
On Thu, 2023-04-13 at 20:06 -0700, bawolff wrote:
> > "I think there are lots of promising opportunities to incentivise
> > people to pay off technical debt and make our existing stack more
> > sustainable. Right now there are no incentives for engineers in
> > this regard."
>
> Interesting. Perso
Hello Selena,
from my point of view it is important to build trust between the Wikimedia
Foundation and the community. It is great that you mentioned in your email that
there are problems regarding trust into the Wikimedia Foundation of parts of
the community at the moment. I have difficulties
Hi Hogü-456,
I just wanted to jump in with a link to
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Product - a page that we recently
updated to list out the Wikimedia Foundation product teams, highlight their
areas of work, and link to venues where you can have input on those
projects. We're endeavouri
This is not really about Selena's email but it's so nerdy I still want to
talk about what tech debt is and what it isn't.
The word tech debt at the beginning meant a very specific thing: When an
engineer takes a shortcut to deliver a feature faster. Daniel has a pretty
good essay on tech debt: htt
Despite agreeing wholeheartedly that technical debt, product debt,
ownership, and maintenance are persistent problems, here's a story about
when this *didn't* happen, which maybe we can learn from.
Disclaimer: this is from my memory of 2014! Warning, potential inaccuracy
and rose-tinted glasses!
Hi Dan,
Thank you so much for sharing this story.
Similarly, I once was colleagues with a group of people working on process
isolation (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_isolation) for Firefox. They had
sort of hit a wall where the memory usage was going to be far more that we
thought user