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How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

1. The Book in Three Sentences

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

I have been working remotely since 2005. Recently, an intern has asked me for advice about it. I've decided to write a blog post. I hope the advice will be useful to a wide range of people. From people new to remote work (possibly because of COVID) to people with years of experience.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

This post gives a quick introduction to a benchmarking tool, phpbench, ready for you to experiment with in core and skins/extensions.[1]

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

1. Reading Club

Smokers pressure you to light one, drinkers pressure you to drink one, we pressure you to publish one. -- Hrvoje Šimić

It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.
― Isaac Asimov

Last week I spoke to a few of my Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) colleagues about how we deploy code—I completely botched it. I got too complex too fast. It only hit me later—to explain deployments, I need to start with a lie.

In Blog Post: macOS vs Ubuntu Linux I've written about a fun experiment. I've dual booted an MacBook Air with macOS and Ubuntu. Then, I ran the same npm scripts on both operating systems. To make things more interesting, I've ran the scripts both on the host operating system and inside a Docker container. Running scripts on Ubuntu was so faster, that I wanted to dual boot my iMac too. At the time, I could not dual boot the iMac because my disk refused to be partitioned. In the last couple of weeks, I've formatted disks on both machines and did a clean install of both macOS and Ubuntu. It's time to run the experiment again!

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

The phoenix is a long-lived, immortal bird associated with Greek mythology (with analogs in many cultures) that cyclically regenerates or is otherwise born again.
Phoenix (mythology) - Wikipedia

Today is the last day of Google Summer of Code 2021. Vidhi Mody and Soham Parekh were mentoring Sahil Grewal on updating WebdriverIO to version 7 in Wikimedia repositories.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

The Deployments page sets the working framework for QA workflow when it comes to deployment. Although the details and the level of QA work might be different from team to team depending on a specific team's workflow, specific projects and, even, specific phases of a project, the below is an outline of what seems to be, in a sense, typical QA activities for a weekly deploy cadence.

Beta cluster - the start

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

The release engineering team triages tasks flagged Release-Engineering-Team on a weekly basis. It is an all hands on deck one hour meeting in which we pick tasks one by one and find out what to do with them. We have started with more than a hundred of them and are now down to just a dozen or so, most filed since the last meeting.

“But what am I going to see?
I don't know. In a certain sense, it depends on you.”
― Stanislaw Lem, Solaris

There are two main purposes of the page object pattern.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

For WMF staff's inspiration week, I decided to take a step back from my work building out a new skin architecture and a redesign of Vector and put myself into the shoes of a skin developer to see if the changes my team had made life easier. As a secondary objective, I was interested in how a MediaWiki skin could be written in Vue.js and what the challenges were to get there.

What makes a bug interesting? Any bug, by definition, has an element of a surprise (otherwise, it wouldn't be a bug). But not all bugs are equal in their ability to be surprising. Some bugs do stand out, presenting two essential elements of a surprise - unexpectedness and/or unusual manifestation. Based on my own classification criteria, I define a bug to be the most interesting if it is either (or both)
(1) difficult to find
(2) has a quite unexpected (mostly disruptive) impact

I do most of my work on a 27-inch iMac from 2012. It's a good desktop machine.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

INTRO
When running QA on emails, the most important things to check are the dynamic content populating correctly for different user types, and ensuring there are no layout issues. Especially in an increasingly mobile world, it's important to review how an email will be displayed on a large variety of devices at once.

Since I was impressed with the depth of presentations at Breakpoint conference (at Browserstack) in July 2021 - see my post Breakpoint at BrowserStack conferences (2020-2021) - reflections and thoughts: Part 1 - Focus on Automation, it was really exciting to see that the next conference (March 2021) would be focusing on the intriguing topic of exploratory testing. The the presentations titles (here is the list of all presentations) looked equally exciting, for example

• "Manual testing is not dead...just the definition"
• "Whole team holistic quality"
• "Contemporary Exploratory Testing"
• "Building a testing culture"

This tip works if you're targeting:

• a local MediaWiki
  • MediaWiki-Docker
  • MediaWiki-Docker-Dev
  • MediaWiki-Vagrant
  • Quibble
• a remote wiki
  • Beta cluster
• continuous integration
  • Quibble
  • selenium-daily

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

“Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

Outreachy Round 21 has finished! Vidhi Mody, Soham Parekh and I were mentoring Harriet Ayugi on project Evaluation of Microsoft Playwright.

One of the critical pieces of our infrastructure is Gerrit. It hosts most of our git repositories and is the primary code review interface. Gerrit is written in the Java programming language which runs in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). For a couple years we have been struggling with memory issues which eventually led to an unresponsive service and unattended restarts. The symptoms were the usual ones: the application responses being slower and degrading until server side errors render the service unusable. Eventually the JVM terminates with:

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

1. Table of Contents

“I felt in need of a great pilgrimage, so I sat still for three days.” Hafiz

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
—Mark Twain

Two previous posts - Exempla Docent Part 1 and Part 2 outlined QA approach to testing functionality of the Suggested edits (SE) module on Special:Homepage. Part 1 explored testing ORES model-articletopic logic implementation and Part 2 described testing user workflows.

It has been more than 3 weeks into my Outreachy internship with Wikimedia foundations. The internship started well and the project that I'm working on is about evaluating Microsoft playwright as a possible replacement to the current automation testing framework being used. Week one was mostly about setting up the Wikimedia core by forking and cloning the Wikimedia core repository from Github. In order to simplify continuous integration, we are using Github as our code hosting platform to evaluate playwright instead of using Gerrit. The setup involved the following steps;

• Forking the Wikimedia repository
• Cloning the repository, setting up and running it on my local machine
• Connecting my forked with upstream
• Configuring CI.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

Recently there has been a small effort on the Release-Engineering-Team to encode some of our institutional knowledge as runbooks linked from a page in the team's wiki space.

The year 2020 has been a year of massive change in the entire world, there are mixed feelings of loss, confusion among others, but all in all, there is always hope that keeps us moving forward. I must say that being accepted as an Outreachy intern has been that ray of light at the end of the tunnel that I needed to end the year and begin the new year. Outreachy is a paid, remote internship program with the goal to support people from groups underrepresented in tech. Starting my career in the field of software engineering has been a journey of hard work, persistence, and seizing every opportunity since where I come from such opportunities are rare and the support for women's engagement in technology is quite low.

In Part 1 of Exempla Docent for QA practices, some approaches to testing ORES model articletopic were explored. This post, as Part 2, will present an overview on testing Suggested edits module (SE) - the UI that presents the ORES articletopic logic to users (more info on Newcomers tasks on Special:Homepage).

October 26-29 2020 was my team's second virtual offsite. We've had many offsites, but the first virtual one was in May 2020. The structure of this offsite was similar to the one in May. About four hours of sessions every day, from Monday to Thursday.

In Blog Post: Google Summer of Code, June-August 2020 I've said:

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

If you want to experiment with Phabricator and/or the Phabricator APIs, it can be convenient to have a local instance to play with.

ORES provides machine learning as a service for Wikimedia projects. The ORES model articletopic was used for the Growth team project - Suggested edits for newcomers on Special: Homepage.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

I've started using Vim in 2014. I've read a few books, wrote a few articles and gave a few talks on Vim. I really like editing text with Vim, but I was never happy with it's file management, extensions, things like that.

June and July were pretty busy. I was on vacation the majority of August. Interns and other mentors were busy even then. For more introduction, read my post Blog Post: Google Summer of Code, February-May 2020.

If you're making changes to a service that is deployed to Kubernetes, it sure is annoying to have to update the helm deployment-chart values with the newest image version before you deploy. At least, that's how I felt when developing on our dockerfile-generating service, blubber.

In February 2020 I've noticed an e-mail that Wikimedia is participating in Google-Summer-of-Code. Unfortunately, I've ignored the e-mail and soon forgot about it.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

Since the late 90s, databases named Internet Routing Registries (IRR) have been trying to fulfill that (single) source of truth role. Unfortunately, they are subject to a lot of issues: fragmentation (many existing databases, not all equally well-maintained), security (some databases allow anyone to “claim” a prefix) and complexity (for the network operators). They also contain a lot of inaccurate data that have accumulated over time.

This project brought two major changes to our infrastructure. Firstly, servers that used to be fronted by LVS for load balancing are now peering directly with our routers. Secondly, we have started using IP anycast for a highly critical service: recursive DNS.

Phabricator upstream has implemented a search engine that does not depend on an external full-text index service. It's been the default in Phabricator for quite some time, however, we have been using the ElasticSearch engine for a few years now due to previous issues with the old engine. Specifically, the old phabricator fulltext engine depended on MySQL's built-in fulltext index functionality. Unfortunately, the fulltext engine in MySQL had inconsistent performance and often returned low quality search results.

HEADER CAPTION: The head of the Statue of Liberty on exhibit at the Paris World's Fair, 1878. The statue was built in France ahead of time, shipped overseas in crates, and then assembled in New York. Image by Albert Fernique / public domain.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

Software development is pretty agile in its nature in that things normally tend to move pretty quickly. However, the faster you move, the more things break. As a codebase grows in size, its pieces become more and more complex, with every line adding a potential bug. In Wikimedia Foundation, we keep a handle on this through rigorous amounts of testing. Manual testing requires a lot of effort especially when you have a large core repository with a plethora of plugins and extensions that need to be tested. One of the hot frameworks on the scene is Cypress, a complete end to end testing solution.

“Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.”
~ Wikimedia Foundation

Today, we are writing to share the discovery and squashing of a bug that occurred earlier this year. This particular bug was also one of the rare instances in which we kept a Phabricator ticket private to address a security issue. To help address questions about when and why we make a security-related ticket private, we’re also sharing some insight into what happens when a private ticket about a security issue is closed.

In 2015 I noticed git fetches from our most active repositories to be unreasonably slow, sometimes up to a minute which hindered fast development and collaboration. You can read some of the debugging details I have conducted at the time on T103990. Gerrit upstream was aware of the issue and a workaround was presented though we never went to implement it.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

Earlier today, the 600,000th commit was pushed to Wikimedia's Gerrit server. We thought we'd take this moment to reflect on the developer services we offer and our community of developers, be they Wikimedia staff, third party workers, or volunteers.

How are we doing on that strive for operational excellence during these unprecedented times?

This week a long-standing "bug" has been fixed in Phabricator.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

We are dropping the wb_terms table, you might ask why we are doing it and why it’s such an important endeavour.

HEADER CAPTION: Screenshot from Wikimedia's famous Visual Editor. The typo "documenation" has a red squiggly line under it indicating the spell checker has automatically detected a spelling error by the author.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

The Cloud Services team is in the process of updating and standardizing the use of DNS names throughout Cloud VPS projects and infrastructure, including the Toolforge project. A lot of this has to do with reducing our reliance on the badly-overloaded term 'Labs' in favor of the 'Cloud' naming scheme. The whole story can be found on this Wikitech proposal page. These changes will be trickling out over the coming weeks or months, but one change you might notice already.

Authors: S.Subramanya Sastry, C.Scott Ananian; Parsing Team; Wikimedia Foundation

In an effort to create a repeatable, streamlined process for consumption of security services the Security Team has been working on changes and improvements to our workflows. Much of this effort is an attempt to consolidate work intake for our team in order to more effectively communicate status, priority and scheduling. This is step 1 and we expect future changes as our tooling, capabilities and processes mature.

One of my longstanding pet peeves is that skin development for MediaWiki is so hard. I propose a radical change to how skins are installed and ask for feedback.

On 14 January 2020, staff at the Wikimedia Foundation discovered that a data file exported from the Wikimedia Phabricator installation, our engineering task and ticket tracking system, had been made publicly available. The file was leaked accidentally; there was no intrusion. We have no evidence that it was ever viewed or accessed. The Foundation's Security team immediately began investigating the incident and removing the related files. The data dump included limited non-public information such as private tickets, login access tokens, and the second factor of the two-factor authentication keys for Phabricator accounts. Passwords and full login information for Phabricator were not affected -- that information is stored in another, unaffected system.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence in November and December? Read on to find out!

In July 2016 the SRE team at Wikimedia Foundation began investigating Prometheus as a modern metrics framework. The experience has been very positive and has provided benefits both for technical debt elimination—such as deprecating Ganglia and Diamond—and adding support for newer technologies like Kubernetes.

WikimediaDebug is a set of tools for debugging and profiling MediaWiki web requests in a production environment. WikimediaDebug can be used through the accompanying browser extension, or from the command-line.

You may have noticed that Phabricator's real-time notification service ("Aphlict") is currently disabled. This means that you will not see real-time notification popups in Phabricator and workboard live-updates aren't happening.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

In Changes and improvements to PHPUnit testing in MediaWiki, I wrote about efforts to help speed up PHPUnit code coverage generation for local development.[0] While this improves code coverage generation time for local development, it could be better.

This past week marks the release of a little tool that I've been working on for a while. In fact, it's something I've wanted to build for more than a year. But before I tell you about the solution, I need to describe the problem that I set out to solve.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence in August? Read on to find out!

This week saw the conclusion of a project that I've been shepherding on and off since September of last year. The goal was for the initialisation of our asynchronous JavaScript pipeline (at the time, 36 kilobytes in size) to fit within a budget of 28 KB – the size of two 14 KB bursts of Internet packets.

Last week, we completed a piece of long-neglected work relating to Puppet, the tool that manages the configuration of every virtual machine in our cloud. Historically, each VM has received its configuration from a physical, production server (the 'puppetmaster'). This meant that there was a constant chatter of traffic back and forth between each VM and unrelated networks and hardware sitting in Wikimedia production. Now, the puppetmasters are located on VMs, so all of that chatter is internal to Cloud Services.

How’re we doing on that strive for operational excellence? Read this first anniversary edition to find out!

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

This will be a brief introduction to this new feature which appeared recently on Phabricator workboards.

Building off the work done at the Prague Hackathon (T216260), we're happy to announce some significant changes and improvements to the PHP testing tools included with MediaWiki.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

We're taking part in the ongoing Event Timing Chrome origin trial, in order to experiment with that API early and give feedback to its designers. The goal of this upcoming API is to surface slow events. This is an area of web performance that hasn't gotten a lot of attention before, but one that can be very frustrating for users. Essentially, when slow events occur, users are trying to interact with the page and it's being unresponsive. Not a desirable user experience.

When we set out to ask Wikipedia visitors their opinion of page load performance, our main hope was to answer an age-old question: which RUM metric matters the most to users? And more interestingly, which ones matter the most to our users on our content.

Unlike most websites, Wikipedia and its sister projects are ad-free. This is actually one of the reasons why our performance is so good. We don't have to deal with slow and invasive third-parties.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

We've recently published research on performance perception that we did last year. The micro survey used in this study is still running on multiple Wikipedia languages and gives us insights into perceived performance.

After many months of discussion, work and consultation across teams and departments[0], and with much gratitude and appreciation to the hard work and patience of @thcipriani and @hashar, the Code-Health-Metrics group is pleased to announce the introduction of the code health pipeline. The pipeline is currently in beta and enabled for GrowthExperiments, soon to be followed by Notifications, PageCuration, and StructuredDiscussions. (If you'd like to enable the pipeline for an extension you maintain or contribute to, please reach out to us via the comments on this post.)