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/1MtDBNTH1g7CZzhwlJ1raEJagA8qM3uoV7ta6i66bO2M/present?slide=id.g3eb97ca8f_10>. 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 Things like multi-datacenter support, and migrating off of outdated technology to newer, more reliable tech.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 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
