Hi everyone,
As I'm sure you're aware, by virtue of my job's scope I sometimes find
areas of attention where a little bit of engineering work would result in a
reasonably sized improvement from a product and user experience standpoint.
Often these problems are ill-defined by the user reporting them, which
obscures the actual simplicity of the problem and deters engineers from
working on them.
I have been raising these issues from time to time in our weekly meetings.
I've thought about that, and decided that that meeting is long enough
already without me trying to cram more into it. I think a large part of the
lukewarm response I get trying to recruit people to do these things is due
to the forum I'm raising these issues in. So I've got an alternative
solution: product microtasks(tm) [1].
Product microtasks are problems that have been reported by a user that I
have assessed, prioritised, and defined a clear-cut engineering solution
for. If you're stuck on your current project and want something else to
work on to cleanse your programming palate, you can do one of these. The
intention for these is that they're little discrete chunks of work that are
easy for you to pick up and not have to worry about defining the solution,
just implementing it.
The list can be found at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Platform_product_microtasks, and could be
thought of as "annoying little bugs for more experienced developers".
Be warned, I may still bug people from time to time to attend to specific
issues. That is a sign of love and a mark of respect. Really. ;-)
Thanks,
Dan
[1]: Yeah, alright, you got me. I've not actually trademarked it. Don't
spoil my fun. :-(
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager for Platform
Wikimedia Foundation