Most MediaWiki developers who attended the Berlin hackathon this weekend have left the German capital and returned home, after three days of collaborative coding, group discussions, short presentations, and bug fixing.
A lot of work was already accomplished on Friday and Saturday, including presentations on test frameworks, coding of new features, discussions on wikitext parsers, and a usability testing session.
Things were a bit slower on Sunday, but lack of sleep didn’t stop developers from coding and smashing bugs. Brandon Harris gave a short talk about identity, editor retention and social features. Domas Mituzas talked about how to improve performance; Tim Starling followed by discussing adding HipHop support for MediaWiki, and its planned deployment to Wikimedia sites.
Mark Bergsma also gave an overview of the situation of the Wikimedia infrastructure regarding IPv6 (and our participation in IPv6 Day) and Mathias Schindler discussed WebP support. All the live notes taken yesterday are available.
The rest of the day was used to continue to code, discuss and smash bugs. Some groups explored the city before returning home. The day ended with participants hacking and socializing at the C-base.
If you couldn’t attend, the videos of all the talks are available for you to watch (or re-watch). Many pictures of the event are already on Wikimedia Commons, and more will follow. Presentation slides will be added to the hackathon page as they come in.
We hope the live video streaming, real-time note taking, and IRCing / tweeting was useful for remote attendees; please tell us what we did right and what needs improving. We’d love to get feedback on what worked for you, and what didn’t.
We’d like to thank everyone who was involved in making this event awesome, and particularly the participants, who came from all over the world to work together to improve our technical platform.
Many thanks to the team from Wikimedia Deutschland as well, who masterminded the whole event: Nicole Ebber, Daniel Kinzler, Cornelius Kibelka, and the rest of their team.
Participants agreed they were looking forward to more hackathons, in Berlin and elsewhere. We’ll see you there!
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Guillaume Paumier
Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Tobias Schumann, under CC-by-sa 3.0 Germany.
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