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Report from the Berlin Hackathon

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By Jarry1250
Developers in the main hall of the Berlin hackathon

Developers descend on Berlin

Over 100 Wikimedians from more than 30 countries made the trip to Berlin this week to attend the 2012 Berlin Hackathon. A joint enterprise of the German chapter (Wikimedia Deutschland) and the Wikimedia Foundation, the event was held over three days from June 1 to 3 for those interested in all things MediaWiki.

Though most of the conference hours were set aside for working on specific coding projects ("hacking"), there were a number of presentations during the three days on topics such as Wikidata; scripting in the new prototype template programming language Lua; and the ResourceLoader 2.0 project, which will see per-wiki gadgets standardised and in many cases centralised. There were talks on optimising SQL queries and writing code with security in mind, a nod to recent concerns that pre-deployment security assessments have become something of a bottleneck in the deployment process. An additional general session targeted the many users who are unfamiliar with the new Git-Gerrit review system. The combined significance of these projects led WMF Deputy Director Möller to give an upbeat introductory speech.

Outside the tutorials, attendees worked on a broad range of their personal projects, including improvements to the influential pywikipedia bot framework, user scripts and gadgets, server-side performance improvements (for example, with regard to IPv6 testing), toolserver-based web tools, Wiki Loves Monuments support, and a diverse array of other initiatives. The international feel to the event meant that cross-wiki and smaller-wiki issues gained attention over the course of the three days; for example, Siebrand Mazeland, a WMF internationalisation specialist, noted that he had personally discussed such issues with more than 50 attendees during the hackathon.

Overall, attendance figures were boosted by a strong promotional effort for the event, backed by some $40,000 in WMF scholarships for those who wished to go but required financial assistance to do so. Seasoned hackers, including many of the "big names" of WMF engineering, worked alongside coders for whom the hackathon was their first Wikimedia tech event. The mood at the end of the three days was buoyant, with many developers seemingly more optimistic about future development potential than they were before the event. It is hoped that the event will encourage greater levels of volunteer development; it may also serve to ease previously aired concerns among volunteer developers that their projects were not being as well-resourced by the WMF as those of their staff developer counterparts.

In brief

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Developer divide
You can now give your opinion now on next week's poll: Have you been to a Wikimedia Tech event? Are you interested in going to one?

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

At the time of writing, 20 BRFAs are active. As usual, community input is encouraged.
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