in Life

tagged journalism, mediawiki

Future plans

I've decided to go back to school starting in April for the spring quarter. I'm tenatively going to be studying journalism, because that seems interesting to me right now. We'll see how long that lasts. ;-)

At the same time I'm also going to be switching to a part-time contract with the Wikimedia Foundation, transferring to the Parsing team, and working on the implementation of shadow namespaces.

So...yay change! But that's enough change for now.

in Tech

tagged linuxconfau

linux.conf.au - Day 2

Day 2! I hopped around quite a bit, so I'll just talk about the talks I particuarly enjoyed. First was a talk about site reliability at Pinterest. The main things I thought that were interesting was how they have also created their own deployment tool, and that they've made it easy for the deployer to rollback their code ranges. After that was a fun talk by Dan about his experiences with FOIA requests in New Zealand.

After lunch was another site reliability talk by Dropbox, which discussed a lot about how they made their pages much smarter, so people only got paged if they actually needed to be paged.

I finished up the afternoon with two functional programming talks, the first talking about how Swift can be used to do functional programming, and the second was about how Facebook uses Haskell in production, and dispelling some of the common myths that surround Haskell. I would definitely recommend watching the recording of the latter.

There was a keysigning party in the evening, as well as the professional delegates networking session, which was a great place to meet new people.

Onto day 3!

in Tech

tagged linuxconfau

linux.conf.au - Day 1

Today was day 1 of the linux.conf.au conference in Geelong. The first two days are organized as "MiniConfs", where rooms have a general topic and presentations are scheduled by the MiniConf organizer instead of the LCA programme committee. In the morning I primarily attended the documentation/technical writing MiniConf. I was slightly surprised by how many of the presenters were from Red Hat, but I'm not surprised that they write a lot of documentation. In the morning, I liked the "On working from home" talk, and some of the tips that different remotees shared. I particularly enjoyed the one where someone set a 3 hour expiry on their ssh keyring so they would be reminded to eat lunch while trying to log into a server.

In the afternoon I attended "Assorted Security Topics in Open Cloud: Overview of Advanced Threats, 2015’s Significant Vulnerabilities and Lessons, and Advancements in OpenStack Trusted Computing and Hadoop Encryption", and I have to say that I didn't really follow most of the talk; I don't think I was the right audience for it. After that I went back to the documentation MiniConf and listened to the amusing "My beautiful jacket" talk.

After afternoon tea (a totally awesome concept by the way), I went over to the bio MiniConf for "Building and deploying the Genomics Virtual Laboratory on the cloud(s)", not really sure what to expect. It turned out to be a pretty good technical talk, and some of the technology they had built looked really interesting, including their cloudbridge library. And we finished with one of the best named talks, "Sequencing your poo with a USB stick". As someone who doesn't really enjoy biology or understand most of it aside from what I learned in high school, I thourougly enjoyed this presentation. The presenter explained most of the concepts, and was an extremely engaging speaker.

The Ingress BoF was in the evening, so it was nice getting to meet some other players and have dinner with them, even if there wasn't much Ingressing. ;)

Ready for day 2!

in MediaWiki

tagged mediawiki, notifications

Cross-wiki notifications on test wikis

As was teased in this week's tech news, cross-wiki notifications are now available as a BetaFeature on testwiki and test2wiki. Simply go to your preferences, enable "Enhanced notifications", trigger a notification for yourself on test2.wikipedia.org (e.g. log out and edit your talk page), and open up your notifications flyout!

The next steps are going to be populating the backend on all wikis, and then enabling it as a BetaFeature on more wikis (T124234).

Please try it out! If you find any bugs, please file a task in the newly-renamed Notifications Phabricator project.