For the past 5ish years, I've been working on a project called libraryupgrader (LibUp for short) to semi-automatically upgrade dependency libraries in the 900+ MediaWiki extension and related git repositories. For those that use GitHub, it's similar to the new dependabot tool, except LibUp is free software. One cool feature…
mwparserfromhell is now fully on wheels. Well...not those wheels - Python wheels! If you're not familiar with it, mwparserfromhell is a powerful parser for MediaWiki's wikitext syntax with an API that's really convenient for bots to use. It is primarily developed and maintained by Earwig, who originally wrote it for…
It's been a little over 2 years since I announced MediaWiki codesearch, a fully free software tool that lets people make regex searches across all the MediaWiki-related code in Gerrit and much more. While I expected it to be useful to others, I didn't anticipate how popular it would become.…
In March 2018, Facebook began automatically rewriting links to use HTTPS using the HSTS preload list. Now all Wikimedia sites (including Wikipedia) do the same. If you're not familiar with it, the HSTS preload list tells browsers (and other clients) that the website should only be visited over HTTPS, not…
A while back, a friend mentioned to me that you could send potatoes through the mail. I was pretty skeptical at the time, but basic Internet research confirmed what they told me. So a little bit later I had the opportunity to send them something, and decided to test it…
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,…
