How we went from an error counter to fixing our code — This blog post was also posted on my personal blog and the Wikimedia tech blog. A while back I wrote about debugging an issue on mobile armed only with an error counter and referrer information. Thankfully I’m pleased to report that we are now tracking and fixing client side JavaScript…

And how this change and other small changes helped increased moderation on mobile — This has also been posted on my personal blog. On a day in November, with the support of others¹, a somewhat absurd bug involving semicolons that took a week to fix was finally squashed. It was part of a group of changes that had led to a 47% bump in…

The night before my flight, I picked up an Accurist wrist watch that my Grandfather, a mechanical engineer, received on his 21st birthday in 1949. When I’d received it I had been told it was broken. I felt compelled to wind it up. It stated ticking away. I wondered about…

A hackathon story — Connecting with the people your software serves is more important than anything else you could do. The Wikimedia movement is an international movement and a Wikimedian is someone who contributes software or free knowledge to one of its many projects (the most famous of which is Wikipedia). Wikipedians work tirelessly…

Talking a bit helped us write off several years of technical debt — A big challenge for any software engineer is explaining an important technical change to an audience who may not necessarily have the appropriate context. “Technical debt” is a phrase that will perplex a product owner if not articulated correctly. If you work in any product-centric team, you’ll likely find many…

Using statsv for JavaScript error reporting — What happens when you have a bunch of JavaScript developers frustrated by not having any JavaScript error reporting in production? They find an unexpected workaround using the tooling they have available. Coding in the dark Wikipedia and its sister sites currently have no JavaScript error reporting. We have been using logstash for tracking server…

How technical debt can become a shared responsibility — MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia, is afflicted with the beautiful dichotomy that plagues many open source projects — it was built over a decade ago with lots of enthusiasm and many fantastic ideas, but with fewer concerns about code quality and long-term maintenance. It should not come as a…

A Christmas song for all those who are bored of Brexit — On the 1st day of Brexmas Theresa May gave to me: an un-recoverable economy On the 2nd day of Brexmas Theresa May gave to me: Two independence referendums and an un-recoverable economy On the 3rd day of Brexmas Theresa May gave to me: Free movement gone Two independence referendums and an un-recoverable economy…

The importance of choice in Wikimedia’s many projects — Recently, a tweet popped up in my feed: “funny how mobile wikipedia is easier to read on desktop than desktop wikipedia.” So why does Wikipedia continue to have a desktop version in 2018? This is not a new question and by far the most common comment relating to Wikipedia I…