Wikimedia Hackathon Athens 2023
I attended my first in-person technical event last month: the 2023 Wikimedia Hackathon in Athens, Greece! After initially getting involved just before certain major world events it was really nice to finally get an opportunity to meet both people I'd consider friends and that I've never worked with before.1
Back in February I predicted that I'd be working on "Likely something WMCS related? Or MW auth stuff (CA/OATHAuth)". In the end I ended up hopping between multiple projects. To summarize:
- I worked with Dreamy Jazz on this CheckUser patch. I really enjoyed getting a perspective on how the CheckUser tool is actually used day-to-day and what kinds of features the CUs find useful.
- Kunal and I deployed the RealMe extension to Wikimedia sites. I think I was the first person to verify their Wikimedia user page on a Mastodon profile, even though I was beaten by Raymond on announcing the new feature to the public. This was certainly one of my more interesting experiences deploying stuff to production, considering it was a Friday evening2 and there was a very real chance of missing dinner if something went wrong.
- I helped Arturo with using toolforge-weld, which is a new helper library project I started a few weeks before the event.
- I helped a bunch of people with using Toolforge and Cloud VPS, and processed access and quota requests to unblock people.
- I used the opportunity to get some signatures on my GPG key as those are still useful when working on Debian.
I got a "I broke Wikipedia and then I fixed it" sticker. Apparently this was one of only three given out this event so I've been really good at breaking (and then fixing) stuff. I think my go-to story for this is the time when I broke the ability to be logged in, including the possibility to log in or out for anyone with an existing session. Unfortunately they don't hand out t-shirts for breaking stuff anymore.
I ended up attending a couple of sessions that I found interesting. I wish I could've attended more, but as expected I couldn't consentrate on the presentations anymore after attending a couple, and I slept over one that I really wanted to attend :(. I still managed to have very interesting conversations with lots of different people.
Thank you to the WMF for providing me a scholarship to attend the event.
About the travel experience itself:
- This was my first time travelling internationally alone. Everything went well, which was nice.
- I liked the Copenhagen and Stockholm-Arlanda airports, everything worked as expected and there were not too many people there. I've been in Stockholm and Copenhagen before many times, but never flown via either of those.
- I flew with two new aircraft types I have not flown on before: B738 and CRJ900. I already dislike the CRJ family as they are clearly designed for shorter people.
I can't wait to meet everyone again, whether that's at Wikimania in Singapore later this year, next year's hackathon or something else.