Tech Lead Digest – Q1 2021

At some point last year I started sending a weekly internal digest to the Wikidata Wikibase team with my tech lead hat on.

The emails are internal only but contain lots of links to reading, podcasts and general goings on that could be useful to everyone.

So here is my first Wikidata Wikibase tech lead digest digest!

🧑‍🤝‍🧑Wikidata & Wikibase

• A collection of Wikibase specific logstash dashboards were created
• We moves our secondary CI from Travis to Github Actions (ADR)
• We archived WikibaseCodesniffer, choosing to use the upstream mediawiki-codesniffer
• Deployment of the Wikidata Query Service UI was moved to microsites
• wdwb-tech phabricator boards were recreated, funneling towards a prioritized tech backlog.
• We created a team site, which contains a list of all code repositories that we own and interact with as a core part of Wikidata / Wikibase. (git repo)
• Browser tests came up as a hot topic. A deep dive and some central analysis occurred seemingly correlation failures with “memory compaction” on VMs. This is out of our control, so we increased timeouts in some key areas.

🌎Wider Wikimedia

• PHP 8 jobs coming to CI soon (gerrit change)
• EventLogging will slowly be phased out, as Wikimedia moves towards it’s more modern Event Platform
• MediaWiki 1.36 was delayed!
• MediaWiki got some new things:
  • PageIdentity (RFC, Gerrit)
  • Authority (Phabricator, Initiative)
• The docker-registry tool finally gets a UI
• The MCR / Multi Content Revisions page got a revamp
• The composer merge plugin for support for composer 2 (pull request)

📰Links & Reading

• PHP 8 was released, see what’s new
• Github became accessible to users in Iran again
• ElasticSearch is going to be moving away from true open source in the future. But Open Distro for Elastisearch by AWS also exists.
• What is the Inverse Conway Maneuver? (1 min)
• Semantic versioning: When you change the required programming language version (4 mins)
• Deep dive on the stack overflow compromise last year (5-10 mins)
• Minimize team cognitive load to increase flow (5-10 mins)
• The importance of a Great Developer Experience (7 mins)
• Leading without managing (11 mins)
• Podcast: Between the brackets, with Me! (1 hour 11 mins)

🧩Did you know?

• Using push --force in git can be scary, but there is an alternative! Checkout --force-with-lease (reading, docs, stackoverflow)
• SeleniumHQ have a dockerized prerelease including headless multi browser tests including video recordings.
• A patch demo service exists for MediaWiki and some set of extensions