Tech Lead Digest – Q2 2021

This is the second installment of my tech lead digest digest with my tech lead hat on for the Wikidata Wikibase team.

This is a digest of my internal digest emails. These contain lots of links to reading, podcasts and general goings on that could be useful to a wider audience.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑Wikidata & Wikibase

• Federated Properties, Mismatch finder & WBaaS maintenance teams have spun up from the Campsite
• The “experimental” patch for Github Dependabot -> Gerrit was merged
• ADR 11 rollout it at 26% (slow and steady)
• The wikibase-docker repository has been flagged as not in use / legacy and will soon be archived
•  wikibase-containers phabricator tickets are being closed or moved to the release strategy phabricator tag
• There was no strong team consensus on ADR 18, and thus we will likely not maintain backward compatibility with MW 1.36 on master of Wikibase for now
• Team Site changes:
  • Team list of repositories now includes the languages, tooling used, creation and last touched dates.
  • The purtle library (for RDF output) was also added to the list of repositories that we own
  • Team tech vision has been updated (using markmap JS)
  • An auto collected list of team ADRS has been added.
  • A documentation page / portal has been added

🌎Wider Wikimedia

• MediaWiki 1.36 was cut and released
• MediaWiki security and maintenance release: 1.31.15 / 1.35.3 / 1.36.1
• Phabricator upstream is shutting down
• Update on WIkimedia moving to Kubernetes
• Proposed usage of Sponsored-By git commit header
• Wikimedia IRC has moved from Freenode to Libera.chat
• At the end of June Wikimedia will be switching Data Centres again
• There is a poll on MediaWiki code style relating to return type hint spacing
• mediawiki-docker-dev will no longer be receiving support from the maintainer. mwcli will be replacing this
• Flakey browser tests are generally more stable than they were (tracked in phabricator)

🔗Links & Reading

• PHP
  • PHP 8.1 is coming (4 mins)
  • PHP8 features I wish were in JavaScript (5 mins)
• W3C
  • W3C Cool URIs don’t change (10 mins)
  • W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0 – Draft 16 June 2021 (many mins)
• Processes & Organization
  • Swiss Cheesing your calendar (3 mins)
  • Stop creating technical stories  (8 mins)
  • Date Scrum (a glossary definition) (4 mins)
  • Prioritization Beyond Algorithms (5 mins)
  • Why engineers can not estimate time (7 mins)
  • Treat your onboarding like your build system (10 mins)
  • Why shared services “Teams” don’t work with Agility (5 mins)
  • Why Are Most Backlog Refinement Sessions Dreadful (7 mins)
  • Why most scaling frameworks are a fad that will blow over – The cautionary tale of the Spotify model (8 mins)
• Development etc.
  • You should throw your unit tests away (2 mins)
  • On Comments in Code (3 mins)
  • Advantages of Trunk only development (3 mins)
  • Exploiting developer infrastructure is easy (3 mins)
  • Using Github CLI to easily synchronize Github repository settings (3 mins)
  • System design paradigm caching (4 mins)
  • Why coding standards should not be part of CI (4 mins)
  • Reasons why bugs might feel impossible (5 mins)
  • Code review thoughts from someone at Amazon (5 mins)
  • The Rise of Frontend Options (Decoupling WordPress) (5 mins)
  • Illustrated guide to leaky abstractions (7 mins)
  • Are These Six Software Anti-patterns Killing Your Delivery? (8 mins)
  • The Product minded engineer (10 mins)
  • A good refresher on OOP if you fancy it (10 mins)

Podcasts & Videos

• Video: Untangling MediaWiki (featuring the compatibility dance) with a session recording from the 2021 Hackathon (25 mins)
• Podcast: Open source, not open contribution (1h 22mins)

🧩Did you know?

• You don’t actually have to use git-review to push to gerrit? (gerrit docs, my blog post)