Some people would rather be at FOSDEM
Its the final day of #Wikimedia all hands and some people would rather be at #FOSDEM
Posts about MediaWiki, Wikipedia, and everything else wiki related
Eliminating PHP polyfills
The Symfony project has recently created a set of pure-PHP polyfills for both PHP extensions and newer language features. It allows developers to add requirements upon those functions or language additions without increasing the system requirements upon end users. For the most part, I think this is a good thing,…
The importance of Artemis Fowl
Artemis Fowl, sitting right of center on my "favorite books" shelf. Nearly two decades later, the Artemis Fowl movie is finally happening. It's hard for me to overstate how important Artemis Fowl has been to me. One of my friends asked me if I saw the trailer today and I…
PHP 7 vs HHVM
First performance production testing of PHP 7 vs HHVM: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206341#4750994Looking good so far!#MediaWiki #HHVM #PHP
Improving quality and maintenance of election result boxes on Wikipedia
I've spent a decent amount of time reading Wikipedia articles about Senate, House, and state races this week. And...there were inconsistencies. Specifically in the election box result templates: That's what it looked like before I updated the article to use my template instead. There are a few different issues. First,…
New php-excimer profiler
Tim is working on a new profiler for PHP, since there are issues with xhprof/tideways that really aren't worth dealing with...and that we can do better in profiling. He's written up some details on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T205059, and there's some initial code in our Gerrit.I've done the initial Debian packaging at https://salsa.debian.org/mediawiki-team/php-excimer…
PoolCounter in Debian proper
I posted most of my poolcounter #Debian packaging work: https://salsa.debian.org/mediawiki-team/poolcounterThere's one remaining issue with the makefile trying to build poolcounterd twice that should get fixed upstream: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/services/poolcounter/+/463700
An update on MediaWiki 1.31 in Debian
Following the MediaWiki 1.31.1 security release, I was finally able to update the Debian package to 1.31 LTS in preparation for the Debian Buster release.
Writing a new MediaWiki tarball release script
Last week's security release of MediaWiki 1.27.5 / 1.29.3 / 1.30.1 / 1.31.1 mentioned a small hint of a new release script being used for this release. Chad came up with the concept/architecture of the new script, I wrote most of the code, and Reedy did the actual release, providing…
2018-08 MediaWiki security update
The #MediaWiki security update has been pushed to #Debian stable after a few hiccups (thanks Moritz!): https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2018/msg00232.htmlI also pushed an update for Xenial users to my PPA: https://launchpad.net/~legoktm/+archive/ubuntu/mediawiki-ltsThose packages are for 1.27, which is the older LTS version. 1.31 hit unstable today, so I'll be providing backports for it shortly!…
Goodbye PHPStorm, hello Atom
I've been using the JetBrains IDE PHPStorm ever since I really got started in MediaWiki development in 2013. Its symbol analysis and autocomplete is fantastic, and the built-in inspections generally caught most coding issues while you were still writing the code. But, it's also non-free software, which has always made…
In the Computer History Museum
I'm in the Computer History Museum (and a bunch of my friends are too)! Life goal: accomplished. ^.^
HTML tidy is gone
One of the projects I've been working on since ~October 2016 is now finally done: we no longer use HTML tidy on Wikimedia sites: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/07/09/tidy-html5-replacement/
Introducing CoverMe: find the most called MediaWiki code lacking test coverage
CoverMe, hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge Test coverage is a useful metric, but it can be difficult to figure out exactly where to start. That's where CoverMe is useful - it sorts functions by how often they're called on Wikimedia production servers, and then displays their coverage status. Try it out!…
Preview of CoverMe
Preview of a project I've been working on: identifying the most valuable parts of our code to write tests for by sorting test coverage data by number of times the function is called in production.#mediawiki #testcoverage