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…
Programmatically convert Github master branch to main
Back in 2020 Github said that the default settings for new repositories would change. On Oct. 1, 2020, any new repositories you create will use main as the default branch, instead of master Some blog post on Medium Github provided some advice for renaming branches focused around how this can be done in the UI.…
Testing WDQS Blazegraph data load performance
Toward the end of 2020 I spent some time blackbox testing data load times for WDQS and Blazegraph to try and find out which possible setting tweaks might make things faster. I didn’t come to any major conclusions as part of this effort but will write up the approach and data nonetheless incase it is…
PHP 7 composer docker image digest
At some point in the last weeks the composer docker image that can be found on docker hub switched from PHP7 to PHP8. Some projects, such as wikibase-docker, still require PHP7 for installation. It looks like the composer image is not going to be providing an additional tag using a pre PHP 8 version, thus…