Wikimedia Hackathon 2024, Tallinn, Estonia

What is a Hackathon?

A hackathon happens when software developers spend a few days together, usually on a weekend. If you take a look at the photos of an usual hackathon, it doesn’t look very exciting. Most of the time it’s just people looking at screens. What makes it exciting, especially in Wikimedia context, is that people looking at screens have traveled from all over the world to spend a few days together.

As usual, the Wikimedia hackathon started with project pitches. If you wanted to get people interested in a project, you had 30 seconds to present it. It’s always a fun part of the event. You don’t realize how short 30 seconds is, until you’ve tried to explain something non-trivial and the timer is counting down.

There were too many pitches to list here. I’ll mention a few that sounded the most interesting to me.

• Addshore mentioned Cli. I have used it in the past, but it has been a while. (Months? Years? Probably years.) During the hackathon I was sitting at a (big round) table, talking with somebody about something (I can’t remember the details any more). Addshore was sitting at the same table. He joined the discussion and mentioned Cli. I had some trouble installing it, but with his help it now works on my machine.
• Christoph Jauera presented Browser testing with Cypress. I’m very interested in testing in general, and browser automation tools in particular.
• Amir Aharoni said he’ll work on translations. I wanted to help translate mediawiki to Croatian, but I didn’t manage to do it during the hackathon.

Sessions

I do my best to document tech events I go to, but usually life happens and it takes me a few weeks. By the time I finally have some time to write a blog post, my memory is a bit blurry and I do my best with the help of my notes, if there are any, if I can find them, and finally, if I can read them.

I added a couple of sessions to the schedule.

• Software testing for developers
• Upgrade WebdriverIO to v9 in core

It wasn’t in the schedule, but I did talk with Christoph Jauera and Lucas Werkmeister about a task that’s open since 2020, Refactor WebdriverIO tests from sync to async mode. We talked about what’s still left to do there. It’s closer to resolving than I had hoped. As far as I can see, the only thing left is documentation updates. I have already started working on that since the hackathon.

Friday

Introducing Codex, the new Design System for Wikimedia - I have heard about Codex. I think I already participated in a few sessions about it in the last few years. It’s an interesting project that could significantly improve testability. Or, it could make it significantly harder. That’s why I’m so interested in it. We’ve shortly discussed testability in the Q/A session and the developers say there should be no trouble there.

Christoph Jauera presented Browser testing with Cypress. It was a very interesting and realistic, real-world comparison of Cypress and WebdriverIO and why his team switched from WebdriverIO to Cypress.

Saturday

My team had a great last-minute idea to lead a session about the team. We introduced the team and each present member introduced themselves. We talked about what each present member of the team does. There was an audience and they had questions. We tried to answer the questions.

I was pleasantly surprised that my very old MacBook Air running Ubuntu connected to the projector (using a dongle I hadn’t used in years) with absolutely no problem.

Sunday

Sunday was a bit shorter. In the morning a few of us went to a Catholic mass in Estonian. It was a very interesting experience. Nobody understood a word of Estonian, but the singing was amazing.

I had another last-minute idea. Upgrade WebdriverIO to v9 in core session after lunch. Only Christoph Jauera joined me, but we created a patch and made some progress on the task.

Misc

I brought two chess boards and left them on tables. I was glad to see people playing here and there. I didn’t end up playing much, maybe just a couple of games. I planned to play much more. The last hackathon I played about ten games and lost seven. This time I played two games and lost one. Statistics say I’m improving.

There was a candy and coins table. I don’t care about coins and I try to avoid sugars, but it was very interesting to see various candies from all over the world.

Links

• Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 at mediawiki.org
• Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 at commons.wikimedia.org