I recently released 5.0.0 of my grr tool that makes working with Gerrit easier. It is an alternative to git-review; I personally think grr is more straightforward to use, but I also haven't used git-review since 2014 when I first got frustrated enough to create grr. I had let it…
The demise of goo.gl is a good opportunity to write about how we built a less terrible URL shortener for Wikimedia projects: w.wiki. (I actually started writing this blog post in 2016 and never got back to it, oops.) URL shorteners are generally a bad idea for a few main…
I had a wonderful time at the 2023 Wikimedia Hackthon in Athens, Greece, earlier this month. The best part was easily seeing old friends that I haven't met in person since probably 2018 and getting to hack and chat together. I also met a ton of new friends for the…
I landed file upload support in the mwapi (docs) and mwbot (docs) crates yesterday. Uploading files in MediaWiki is kind of complicated, there are multiple state machines to implement and there are multiple ways to upload files and different options that come with that. The mwapi crate contains most of…
By the time you read this, you'll probably have seen Wikipedia's new layout ("skin"), dubbed "Vector 2022". You can read about the changes it brings. As with most design changes, some people will like it and some people won't. But me? I just feel sad because years ago we had…
I recently did a short sprint on Scribunto, the MediaWiki extension that powers templates written in Lua. It's a very stable extension that doesn't see very many changes but given how useful it is to making most wikis work, I thought it could use some love. Patches written: Simplify creating…
