User:Zakgreant

Übersicht Hi! I'm Zak Greant, a writer and open source jack o' trades. I'm consulting with the Wikimedia Foundation from May 2010 until November 2010 with a focus on the MediaWiki developer documentation and the Wikipedia technical operations documentation. What I'm doing Look at my reports, daily logs, global activity feed or Mediawiki.org Manual namespace activity feed to find out what I am doing and working on. What I'm planning to do Visit my todo list to see what small tasks I should be working on. Look at the Objectives section of my current weekly report (displayed to the right) to see my focus for this week. About me I've been engaged with Free Software and Open Source for most of my adult life, starting with Perl in 1996 (then quickly moving to PHP.) My work as a profession tech editor and writer in began 2000. I use the Colemak keyboard layout (no repetitive strain injuries since 2008, yay!), Vim editor, Mac OS X on my laptop and Ubuntu on my desktop. See the #Background section below if you'd like to know a bit more about me. Contact Info Blog http://zak.greant.com E-Mail [email protected] IRC zakg on irc://irc.freenode.net#mediawiki Jabber [email protected] Skype zak_greant

Report for Week 40 of 2010 (Oct. 4 to 10) ◄   27 September 2010 View All Reports 11 October 2010   ► Summary: Good week with progress on all fronts. (For more information on this report format, read meta:Weekly_Reports.) Objectives for This Week What I hope to do this week. (Check next week's report to see how I did.) Expand MediaWiki technical documentation plan with community feedback gathered over past two weeks. Draft style guide based on principles and ideas in the draft MediaWiki technical documentation plan Review and edit all English-language Special:RecentChanges to MediaWiki.org. Ensure that all developer-related info information on mediawiki-api/mediawiki-l/wikitech-l is incorporated into MediaWiki.org Complete Technical Documentation project page . Complete Security for developers page – in particular, gather best practices from other docs and devs. Accomplishments for Last Week How I did on reaching my objectives for last week: [DONE] Test ideas from draft MediaWiki technical documentation plan [DONE] Ad hoc documentation work / community engagement. Reviewed all pending changes, moved some info from various mailing lists into the manual. [DONE] Refactor Security for developers page. Draft refactoring of main page at User:Zakgreant/Security for developers. Split Cross-site scripting, Cross-site request forgery, Register globals and SQL injection off into separate pages (that I then cleaned up all except Cross-site scripting.) Bonus Accomplishments for Last Week I didn't plan for these things, but I still did them. drafted project page for Technical Documentation activities (in support of WMF Engineering Overview October 2010) wrote draft blog post on my recent activities - still need to post Edit report Log for 2024-09-16 PST/PDT

Office Hours

I'm usually on irc://irc.freenode.net#mediawiki when I'm working.

On Wednesdays/Thursdays (depending where you are), I host IRC office hours sessions that focus on discussing work on the developer documentation, along with related topics. I'll be on irc://irc.freenode.net#wikimedia-office for discussions at the following times, unless otherwise noted. (Note: I've tried to make it so that there are relatively sane times available for people, regardless of where they live in the world.)

UTC-7	UTC-4	UTC+1	UTC+2	UTC+5:30	UTC+8	UTC+9	UTC+11
San Francisco	New York	London	Bern	New Delhi	Beijing	Tokyo	Canberra
Wed 09:00 - 10:00	Wed 12:00 - 13:00	Wed 17:00 - 18:00	Wed 18:00 - 19:00	Wed 21:30 - 22:30	Thu 00:00 - 01:00	Thu 01:00 - 02:00	Thu 03:00 - 04:00
Wed 21:00 - 22:00	Thu 00:00 - 01:00	Thu 05:00 - 06:00	Thu 06:00 - 07:00	Thu 09:30 - 10:30	Thu 12:00 - 13:00	Thu 13:00 - 14:00	Thu 15:00 - 16:00

Background

I've had a few questions about my background. Here's a quick summary:

1990: Dropped out of high school.
1991: Worked various dead-end job(s).
1992: Dropped out of cooking school.
1993: Worked dead-end job(s).
1994: Started web-business with mother and brother. Learned HTML.
1995: Posted first real website.
1996: Learned enough Perl to build a postcard site. Started learning PHP. Met future wife, fell in love. Quit day job at dental lab.
1997: Co-founded first web startup.
1998: Year a blur of startup madness. First archived post on the PHP mailing lists [1]
1999: Startup failed. Went to work at ISP. Co-founded PHP Quality Assurance Team.
2000: First tech edit (PHP Developer's Cookbook). Began work on first book as lead author (PHP Functions Essential Reference)
2001: Quit ISP to finish book / first speaking engagement at conference. Started working at MySQL AB (a startup) as technical evangelist and community manager.
2002: Spoke at many conferences. Dealt with MySQL client libraries licensing kerfuffle. Co-authored MySQL GPL exception. Started traveling for ~50% of the year.
2003: Spoke at many, many conferences.
2004: Spoke at many, many conferences. Quit MySQL. Went to work at Sxip (a startup). Became member of the Free Software Foundation's license compliance team.
2005: Quit startup. Started work at eZ Systems (a startup) as their Director of Free Software and Open Source Affairs. Started work at the Mozilla Foundation as their Ombudslizard.
2006: Opened and managed North American office for eZ Systems.
2007: Worked far too much.
2008: Worked far, far too much. Cut travel schedule back to sane levels. Joined Open Source Initiative as volunteer.
2009: Quit eZ Systems. quit Mozilla. Co-founded my own startup.
2010: Startup on back burner. Began consulting for Wikimedia Foundation.

Along the way, I've spoken at over sixty free software, open source and technology events, and have helped chair or organize over a dozen of these events. I've also continued to be active as a writer and editor, having served as a technical editor on a few dozen technical books (including Mastering Regular Expressions (3rd ed.) by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, Advanced PHP Programming by Georg Schlossnagle and MySQL (3rd Edition) by Paul DuBois.)

Software and Tools

• MediaWiki History Sparklines – A Greasemonkey extension for Firefox that uses jQuery, jQuery Sparklines and the MediaWiki API to display sparklines (small graphs) of recent changes to MediaWiki pages. Useful to quickly see if a page is out-of-date or note. Screenshots, source, feature requests and more at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/79234
• I use the Simpler English Dictionary add-on for Firefox to help me use Simple English words. Visit

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Using+the+spell+checker?s=dictionary&as=s#Adding_dictionaries for help on using the dictionary.