It’s crazy how fast the past 3 months have gone by, but I’m in the final week of my Outreachy internship with the Wikimedia Foundation!
What I’ve been up to
The week after the Wikimedia Developer Summit, I spent 3 days working from WMF headquarters in San Francisco. It was great to meet and work with some of the team in person, mainly my mentor, Tilman Bayer, a senior analyst at WMF. The office is spread across a couple floors with lots of meeting rooms and open spaces for people to collaborate.
I gave a talk at a PyLadies San Fransisco meetup which was hosted by WMF about my journey “Becoming a Data Analyst”. About 70 people attended and this was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken in front of! I didn’t know until just before the presentation that it would be recorded, but now I’m glad to be able to review my presentation skills. For having almost no prior public speaking experience, I’m happy with my talk. However, there are a couple things I want to work on such as not swaying around as much and limiting the number of “uhms”. I’m also glad that it was recorded so that I could help others by sharing my experience learning data analytics, which was one of my main goals when I started this blog. I wanted this talk to be useful for those who aren’t even sure where to begin learning and it was really gratifying to have people come up to me afterwards (and later random people message me on LinkedIn) and say it did exactly that. …
The Outreachy Internship program grants a $500 travel allowance to each intern to attend a relevant conference or workshop of their choice. I attended the Wikimedia Developer Summit this week in San Francisco, CA at the Golden Gate Club.
This is an annual gathering for technical contributors, third-party developers, users of MediaWiki and users of the Wikimedia APIs. The first two days of the summit consist of technical sessions, while the third day is a completely unscheduled day to “Get Stuff Done”. Basically, everyone gets together to hack on the ideas discussed the previous days to actually make them happen.
Unfortunately, due to a winter storm in New England and lots of flight delays, I missed the first day of the summit, which was a bummer. …
My second data analysis internship project with the Wikimedia Foundation includes generating (at least) 3 readership metrics reports. This report aggregates various data sources to display critical information about Wikimedia projects such as daily pageview counts, the percentage of desktop vs. mobile traffic, and the number of daily iOS + Android app downloads. These are common statistics for websites to track to help understand user behavior and call attention to unusual events.
During the course of my internship, I plan to release one report per month. I published my first readership report on December 12th, 2016 which covered the 18 week timespan from August 1 — December 4, 2016. My second report was published January 6, 2017 and covered the 4 weeks since the previous report. …
