Fuzheado, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Long time no see

Last month I was in beautiful Athens, Greece for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2023. The last time I saw anybody from the Wikimedia Foundation in person was in San Francisco in 2020. The last time I saw anybody from the Wikimedia movement was in Atlanta in 2019. The last in person hackathon was in Prague in 2019. So, I didn't see some people for 3 and some for 4 years. I have also seen some people for the first time, even if we collaborated for years.

Hackathon

It's really hard to summarize a hackathon. It's a crazy mixture of technical talks, coding, socializing, sightseeing and fun.

It started with project pitches. Everybody that wanted to, could get people interested in their project. But, since there were about 200 people there, everybody got only 30 seconds. Fun part was that if you went over your time, you were clapped off the stage.

One of the interesting sessions I went to was T332794: [Session] Using Pixel tool for visual regression by @Etonkovidova. Elena was very nervous before the session, but she did a great job. We had a great discussion during the session. @dom_walden showed us how he set up T337539: Add WikiLambda extension and tests to Pixel.

Another interesting session was how to T332881: [Session] Improve your technical writing by @kostajh. At that session I learned about LanguageTool and Google's Technical Writing Courses.

The last session I'm going to mention is the T337340: [session] Using Patch demo to test or demonstrate patches outside of your local dev environment (or without one!) by @matmarex. I'm very interested in development/testing environments, so I try to learn at least the basics of available ones.

My plan was to work on one of several projects at the hackathon. Either documentation (T256239: Create MediaWiki-Docker documentation for all repositories with Selenium tests), or a refactoring (T256626: Refactor WebdriverIO tests from sync to async mode), or an upgrade (T324685: Upgrade WebdriverIO to v8 in all repositories). That didn't happen. But that's how hackathons sometimes go.

I applied for the hackathon months ago. In the meantime, I didn't work for a couple of months because I was on parental leave. The hackathon was near the end of my leave, so I was pretty lost and confused at the event.

Misc

I managed to do some sightseeing. One day after the sessions a few of us walked to the Philopappos Monument. It's on the top of a hill with a beautiful view of Athens. Another day I visited Acropolis.

A few of my teammates from the Quality-and-Test-Engineering-Team were at the hackathon, so one day we met for lunch. We didn't see each other in person for at least 3 years. It was great to be able to socialize after such a long time.

I have also learned about a new saint, Saint Javelin.

I was disappointed that there was no organized sightseeing, considering we were in one of the most interesting cities in the world.

Chess

01tonythomas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I forgot to bring a chess set, so I bought a cheap plastic set. I led a Chess Basics workshop during lunch one day and had a few games of chess during the hackathon. I was hoping for a few easy wins. I have played about 10 games. I think I managed to win just 2, and somehow draw 1 game. I lost the rest. I'm glad this was a hackathon and not a chess tournament. My rating would be seriously decreased. 😅

Links

• Wikimedia Hackathon 2023 at mediawiki.org
• 2023 Wikimedia Hackathon recap at legoktm.com
• Notes on the Wikimedia 2023 Athens Hackathon at kostaharlan.net
• Wikimedia Hackathon Athens 2023 at taavi.wtf
• A short account of the Wikimedia Hackathon 2023 at diff.wikimedia.org
• Wikimedia Hackathon 2023 Blog at github.io
• Wikimedia Hackathon Athens 2023 at commons.wikimedia.org