Tech Lead Digest – August 2021
Welcome to the 4th instalment of my Wikidata & Wikibase Tech lead Digest for August 2021. For previous instalments see Q1, Q2 & July. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑Wikidata & Wikibase The Wikidata Query Builder has been deployed. The Wikidata Query Builder provides a visual interface for building a simple Wikidata query. It is ideal for users with little…
Pulling data into Google Sheets from Phabricator
Phabricator is a suite of web-based software development collaboration tools, used by Wikimedia and many other organizations. One of these tools is a fairly customizable task tracker. In a recent post I described the current Technical Debt backlog prioritization for Wikidata and Wikibase. Part of that process currently makes use of Google Sheets for a…
sudo / elevate on Windows 11
Windows has never had a native sudo or elevation feature. Of course if you write the correct Power Shell commands you can make this happen, but what we really want is convenience. There are various packages around to help out and various ways to install them. And in Windows 11 with a new package manager,…
Tech Lead Digest – July 2021
Welcome to the third installment of my tech lead digest digest. In order to allow myself some extra space to write, and also to provide these public updates and thoughts on a more regular basis, this is now becoming a monthly digest. I’m going to try to incorporate some of the ongoings from other Wikidata…
What happens in Wikibase when you make a new Item?
A recent Wikibase email list post on the topic of Wikibase and bulk imports caused me to write up a mostly human readable version of what happens, in what order, and when, for Wikibase action API edits, for the specific case of item creation. There are a fair few areas that could be improved and…
A first look at Wikidata through Github Copilot
I was added to the Github Copilot preview in the past days, and the first thing I tested out was code suggestions around Wikidata. Copilot allows you to start writing code, and have a model trained on public Github code suggest block of code that you might want to use. For example, if you start…
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…