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!
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.
Originally posted on Twitter.
Getting ready for LCA2016 :D
Wikipedia turned 15 last week. Aside from having my friends wish me a happy birthday, I also went to the party in San Francisco. I had a good time meeting up with some Wikimedians that I hadn't seen in a while, and also enjoyed the talks. My favorite was by User:Dreamyshade, who talked about "Stories from the weird old days". I'd recommend watching it if you have 30 minutes of free time :-)
And as always, new laptop sticker ^.^
Originally posted on Twitter.
Had to walk up a mile long trail to create my first 1k MU field :D
A lot happened at the Wikimedia Developer Summit over the past week, I had a fantastic time and enjoyed getting to meet up with everyone again. Here's a quick recap:
- Learned about the status of the Differential migration, I feel more reassured about the workflow now, just not sure about when it's going to happen.
- Attended a very productive meeting with the MediaWiki Stakeholder's group, Mark (hexmode) has written up a good summary of the meeting. I'm optimistic about the future.
- Held an impromptu session about shadow namespaces, which left me with lots of questions to answer. I haven't had a chance to summarize the notes yet, will do so later this week.
- Had an exciting main room discussion about supporting non-Wikimedia installs of MediaWiki and our other software, which continued out into the hallways. I think we need to continue with more research and talking with hosting providers about how MediaWiki is actually used. For a while now I've been concerned with whether we're able to get our users to actually upgrade. WikiApiary says that 1.16.x is nearly as widely used as 1.25.x (the current legacy release).
- Had an early morning session about beta rollouts, usage of BetaFeatures, and communication channels.
- Attended the "software engineering" session about dependency injection and then SOA. I mainly just listened in this one.
- Went to a session by community liasons about interacting with communities and stuff. Also mainly just listened.
- Finally, had a really productive session led by bawolff about code review, and how we can improve the situation.
I hacked on quite a few different projects, more on that later :)
And, new laptop stickers ^.^
