User:Zakgreant

Übersicht Hi! I'm Zak Greant, a writer and open source jack o' trades. I'm consulting with the Wikimedia Foundation with a focus on the MediaWiki developer documentation. What I'm doing I use Twitter to log my WikiMedia Foundation work: visit http://twitter.com/zwmf to read the log. Look at my WikiMedia global activity feed or Mediawiki.org activity feed to see what edits I've made. My commits are at Special:Code/MediaWiki/author/zak What I'm planning to do 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 Twitter zwmf

Report for Week 02 of 2011 (Jan. 10 to 16) ◄   3 January 2011 View All Reports 17 January 2011   ► No summary yet. (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.) Get embedded API docs onto MediaWiki.org as per User:Zakgreant/API_docs_integration N Make New-installer_issues/Main_page suitable as replacement for current installer completion text. Keep the page short and useful. We don't want to present users with a frightening wall of post-install text that they'll ignore. N Improve resource loader docs. N Take edit pass on Cross-site scripting, Cross-site request forgery, Register globals and SQL injection. N Write docs for key Title class methods (inc. getLinkUrl(), getLocalURL(), getFullURL(), getInternalURL(), getPrefixedURL()) Accomplishments for Last Week How I did on reaching my objectives for last week: N Improve resource loader docs. (Made progress, but didn't complete. N Write docs for key Title class methods (inc. getLinkUrl(), getLocalURL(), getFullURL(), getInternalURL(), getPrefixedURL()) N Sync the API docs with the embedded documentation in the API.  Make plan to update the docs (inc. flagging what user docs need update) for the 1.17 release.  Take edit pass on Security for developers.  Polish first level of developer docs linked from the main page: How to become a MediaWiki hacker, API, Manual:Extensions, etc. Edit report

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.