Wikimedia Hackathon Tallinn 2024

Published by Taavi Väänänen on May 14, 2024.

This year's Wikimedia Hackathon was held in early May in Tallinn, Estonia. Like last year, it was a great opportunity to both see people I work with regularly, including people in my own team that I had not seen in person before, and to work with and help people that I have had very limited interactions with before.

I presented a session about Puppet (slides), the configuration management tool used on Wikimedia infrastructure (and some other projects I've been involved on) which I think went quite well. I also organized (read: picked a spot for in the schedule) the cuteness meetup.

In addition to the sessions, the main focus of the event was, of course, hacking. As usual, I didn't make any major plans beforehand, and instead ended up working on several smaller projects as they popped up.

Here is a list of things I can remember working on:

• I fixed several small issues in LibUp that makes it pass on more MediaWiki repositories (including core.git). James and I also migrated the LibUp configuration to GitLab.
• I finished up an MR to grunt-banana-checker to add support for automatically fixing some common issues that were causing LibUp failures and to fix some minor bugs.
• I worked with Piotr to get some of my patches to the OATHAuth and WebAuthn MediaWiki extensions merged. This is a part of my project to add support for more than one two-factor authentication device at a time that I was also working on during the Wikimania 2023 hackathon. Next up on this project is writing some UI code.
• I fixed Wikimedia Gerrit twice after it had some issues that needed SRE intervention.
• I sent a patch to Wikimedia's Phabricator/Phorge fork to add a new fox token. This ended up being deployed on Sunday and I got to showcase this during the hackathon showcase.
• Reedy and I implemented support for foxes in WikiLove. I also wrote a bot to spam foxes to Sammy's talk pages on the beta cluster.¹ (This also involved a fun side quest to get a working thumbnail for the fox image we used to show up on Beta since the thumbnailing there is broken.)
• I removed some deprecated code from core to earn the MediaWiki track T-shirt. I also reviewed a bunch of patches by others trying to earn that T-shirt.²
• I found and reported some bugs relating to Parsoid read views on Commons.
• I processed some Toolforge account approval requests and Cloud VPS project requests. I also helped some people debug some Cloud VPS issues.
• I helped Bryan debug and fix an issue with HTTP/1.1 streams through the Toolforge front proxy.
• I made some queries on the Wiki Replicas accidentally very slow and then fixed them to be fast again on the next day.
• Got a 100% helpful, harmless, useful, etc. patch merged to something. I will provide no more details on this one.

Finally, a conversation I had at the hackathon resulted in me nominating Novem Linguae for mediawiki/* +2 access a few days after the hackathon.

I had a great time, and the ferry trip to Tallinn was much nicer than the very early flight I had last year. I can't wait to see you all again :-)

Disclosure: I am currently a Wikimedia Foundation contractor, and the Foundation did pay for my travel to Tallinn. This is my personal blog and these are my own opinions.