Tackling Technical Debt, big and small, in Wikidata and Wikibase
If you’re working with legacy code, chances are you’ve inherited some technical debt. Infact, if you’re working with code, chances you’re already surrounded by technical debt of varying sizes, at least by some measures. Some believe that technical debt is something to be avoided, and that technical debt that exists is a dirty secret that…
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…
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…
mediawiki-docker-dev, a history
MediaWiki-Docker-Dev (or MWDD) is a development environment for MediaWiki, based on Docker and docker-compose. It was created back in 2017 at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Vienna where it had a slightly difference feature set and focus. (Original Slides). Since inception the git repo now has 180 commits from 20 authors over the course of 4…
Github repo settings sync, using the Github cli
The number of Github repositories that I end up maintaining in one way or another ends up growing week by week. And keeping all of the descriptions and settings up to date in sync can be painful todo by hand. A little while ago I migrated my addwiki project to use a monorepo, and thus…
Resizing a qemu image root disk partition
Recently I found myself altering some virtual images for loading onto a qemu machine. I wanted to increase the disk space on the root partition, but couldn’t find any straightforward guides. So here is a little guide for future me, and anyone else. Install libguestfs-tools libguestfs is a set of tools for accessing and modifying…
WBStack setting changes, Federated properties, Wikidata entity mapping & more
During the first 3 months of 2021, some Wikimedia Deutschland engineers, from the Wikidata / Wikibase team, spent some time working on WBStack as part of an effort to explore the WBaaS (Wikibase as a service) topic during the year, as outlined by the development plan. We want to make it easier for non-Wikimedia projects…
WBStack Infrastructure
WBStack is a platform allowing shared scalable hosting of Wikibase and surrounding services. A year ago I made an initial post covering the state of WBStack infrastructure. Since then some things have changed, and I have also had more time to create a clear diagram. So it is time for the 2021 edition. WBStack currently…
Twitter bot powered by Github Actions (WikidataMeter)
Recently 2 new Twitter bots appeared in my feed, fullyjabbed & fullyjabbedUK, created by iamdanw and powered entirely by Github Actions (code). I have been thinking about writing a Twitter bot for some time and decided to copy this pattern running a cron based Twitter bot on Github Actions, with an added bit of free…
If you bake 2 lasagnes, and stack them, do you have 1 or 2 lasagnes?
This is the question that I asked a group of around 50 people this evening as part of a food for thought exercise. 37 replied before I decided to write this blog post, and here is a quick summary… The question was “If you bake 2 lasagnes, and then put one on top of the…