User blog:TOR/Busy Week for the Tech Team



Hello, Wikians! Can you guess what happened in our office last week? Sure, we got new bean bags... but the bigger news is that our engineers and server admins met for the Wikia Tech All Hands event.

In an unprecedented concentration of techiness, the Wikia Technical Team gathered for a week-long summit at our development center in Poznań, Poland. Here are some highlights from the event:

A better, faster Wikia
If you’ve ever tried to read a handwritten note, you know how difficult it can be to decipher another person’s scribbling. There’s a similar problem with codes &mdash; when a bunch of different people code, the results can be messy and hard to follow. At All Hands, we worked on a method to streamline writing code, which will hopefully result in a better, faster, and more stable website.

In fact, we talked about how to make the site faster (like using HipHop) for almost 60 hours. Don’t worry, it wasn’t all work &mdash; we took a few breaks to sleep, play paintball, and tour a local beer factory.

Hackathon extravaganza
Of course, there’s a different kind of fun unique to computer geeks like us &mdash; hacking! The team spent a whole day furiously hammering at our keyboards to come up with solutions for the site. We experimented with ideas ranging from back-end tools that help developers to ideas for new tools for users. There are a lot of cool projects in the mix, and we’ll keep you updated on their progress.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for improving the site, please leave a comment below. The next All Hands is in 2012, and who knows, maybe we’ll see you there?