Edit 2023/How to get your code deployed: 2024/Main Page

WikiConference North America 2023 unfortunately could not accommodate this submission in its program this year.

Getting your code deployed to Wikimedia production can be hard. If you're not familiar with the requirements or who to ask for help, you can spend a lot of time developing something, only to get a very quick no when you try to get it deployed. It's demotivating and disheartening and wastes everyone's time!

But it really doesn't have to be that way. Getting code deployed to Wikimedia sites, even for volunteers, can actually be quite straightforward. This talk will walk through a project's lifecycle: 1) conceiving an idea 2) initial prototyping and development 3) refinement 4) formal reviews 5) deployment 6) maintenance 7) sunset. We will look at multiple case studies of deployments that went smoothly and were boring (a good thing!) and some that did not.

The intended audience for this talk is both developers (i.e. programmers) and people with ideas/product managers (non-programmers). We will discuss some specific technical requirements and restrictions, but will aim to avoid specific code things or jargon to keep it as accessible as possible.

Time permitting, we can do a lightning round evaluation of people's ideas and how to move forward on them (if reasonable). Otherwise people can find me afterwards.