[Labs-l] Tool Labs and my new job at WMF

Fri Apr 15 17:41:33 UTC 2016

I for one am psyched to see this news :)

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 10:17 AM, Bryan Davis <bd808 at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I recently transferred from the Reading Infrastructure team to the
> Community Tech team [0]. The move happened because I want to spend
> more of my time working with the developers who build tools and bots
> to help the Wikimedia communities. I've been thinking about needs of
> the Tool Labs developers for a while, and in November I finally wrote
> up a proposal about a job focused on this work [1]. I was ready for a
> lengthy discussion with management to defend my ideas about this need,
> but to my surprise the feedback I got instead was mostly "it's about
> time" and "when can you start?". My draft position proposal is now
> "official" and posted on meta [2]. This project will be my major focus
> on the Community Tech team, but I will also be helping out with code
> review, deployments, and other things that the rest of the team is
> working on.
>
> People watching wikitech, labs-l, and Phabricator may have noticed
> that I have been poking at various things since January like a
> redesign of the wikitech main page [3], a new namespace for tool
> documentation [4], and generally being more active in discussing
> problems and possible solutions. Now that I am working on these issues
> full time I want to start talking about bigger issues. I have drafted
> a "vision" document on meta [5] describing some of the larger issues
> with Tool Labs (and Labs and wikitech) that are making things harder
> than they could be. This vision comes with a straw dog project roadmap
> that I think we could work towards. This is not a set in stone
> timeline, but rather a very high level description of a series of
> projects that I believe would move Tool Labs towards being an easier
> environment for collaborative FLOSS projects to thrive in. I will
> continue to refine these project ideas and create Phabricator tasks to
> track them, but before I dive too deeply into that I would like to
> solicit input on both the problems and the general solution roadmap.
> The project page is on meta rather than wikitech to make it easier for
> existing Wikimedians who aren't wikitech users to participate. The
> talk page is open for comments [6] and I look forward to hearing about
> problems and solutions that I have not yet imagined. I hope that as
> the various sub-projects solidify some of you will join me in getting
> the work done.
>
>
> [0]:
> https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Staff_and_contractors&diff=105580&oldid=105576
> [1]:
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:BDavis_%28WMF%29/Projects/Tool_Labs_support
> [2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Tool_Labs_support
> [3]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
> [4]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tool_Labs_tools
> [5]:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Tool_Labs_support/Tool_Labs_vision
> [6]:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Tech/Tool_Labs_support/Tool_Labs_vision
>
> Bryan
> --
> Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808 at wikimedia.org>
> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer            Boise, ID USA
> irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Labs-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/labs-l
>

-- 
Arthur Richards
Team Practices Manager
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
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