I’ve given up on trying to make DevLogs really comprehensive and complete, and just try to make them – even if they are incomplete. Perhaps this will help me actually write more devlogs, and thus make it more comprehensive…

I started on the Functional Programming in Scala course today. I wanted to do it the last time, but did not find the time. This time will be different – I’m in a different spot mentally, and a big drain on my emotional / time resources (“college”) is no longer a factor. I’ve already gone through the first week’s lectures (most seem straight ports from SICP), and am 2/3 of my way through the assignments for the first week. Though I’m normally not fond of the typical types of exercises (“How many ways can you make change for this scenario?”), doing them functionally seems to be enough of a twist to keep me interested. The regular languages I seem to work with these days (Java, PHP, Puppet, Python and a bit of JS) aren’t exactly well tuned to the functional style of programming (except JS, but I don’t really do that much JS these days) – so going through this course and hopefully building something in Scala can exercise my ‘OMG HOLY SHIT THIS NEW THING IS AWESOME!!1’ muscles.

The course recommends using Scala IDE. Which is Eclipse based. Despite my deep distaste for Eclipse, I’ve given it a shot and it seems fairly stable and much less shitty than the Eclipse I’m used to! Let’s see how that goes.

The way I learn the best seems to be to find a project I want to build, and then build it in a new language. I’m looking around for fun projects that I could build with Scala, and I’m pretty sure I’ll find one at some point. I should also try to diversify the communities I contribute to, so perhaps I should look for a non-Wikimedia project where I can contribute to in Scala. Should be fun :D

Other than that – I’ve been investigating performance problems with the Campaigns API – turns out Mediawiki’s Parser is really, really slow. Who would’ve thought, eh? ;). The ‘solution’, of course – is to just add more caching. Which is a sortof biggish, hairy-ish problem because of the number of changes that can cause cache invalidation. The way Mediawiki handles caching is… rather complex – but that is more due to how much functionality exists rather than anything else. Needs a proper ‘clean’ solution that is not just “Let’s cache everything for 5 minutes!!!1”. Should be fun to write up and fix!

I’ve also been spending time integrating Mediawiki-Vagrant with Wikimedia Labs. This will make it easy for anyone to setup a base mediawiki installation on Labs, and save time dicking around various mundane deployment-of-test-instance issues (did I turn on caching? How do I get this extension on? etc). This is interesting because it merges two different puppet repos – operations/puppet.git and mediawiki/vagrant.git on one machine and provides different ways of managing them. Since this is also using puppet as a sort of ‘deployment’ tool (rather than just a configuration-of-systems tool), that is an interesting / fun aspect too. Should be able to get the patch merged in a few weeks.

I visited San Francisco for the last 2 weeks. I don’t really feel insecure anymore :)