Background⌗

It was around Feb 2024, when me and some of my friends (Gopa, Sohom, and Shashwat) (by now you must be aware of them), got scholarship to attend the Wikimedia Hackathon in Talinn, Estonia.

I was pretty excited about this, as this was my first global hackathon. I had attended few Wikimedia events by now (both virtually and physically (in India)), but this felt like a different experience altogether, as this was my first time going abroad.

Preparations⌗

Blah Blah Blah.. Applied for Visa. Got it after much trouble (thanks to VFS Global), got my tickets, hotel reservations, and we flew off.

Unfortunately Sohom and Shashwat couldn’t make it, (again thanks to VFS Global). So it was me, Gopa and few other wikimedia contributors from India (some of them I met during Indic Hackathon, while some were new faces).

Day 1⌗

Reached Talinn, around 2pm (local time). Checked in to the hotel, went for a quick lunch, and then we strolled around the city. It was nice, sunny with a cool breeze (hitting my ears strongly). We went to the Old Town, hitting the local shops nearby (for some souvenirs).

Yup, that’s me wandering in the streets.

Day 2⌗

So now the actual event started. We attended a couple of seminars (learning about Codex, Cypress, Toolforge cloud services .etc).

Met new people, (this is got to be my favorite part). I was meeting all these folks for the first time (prior to this I only knew them with their wiki usernames). I got to put faces to so many names :-)

PS: Parthiv I stole your line :-P. Hope you don’t mind

Day 3⌗

Started working with a tool (Wikimedia Year in Review). Developed by Jon Robinson (a fellow WMF employee). The tool was written in Vue (where funnily understanding the syntax was the most challenging part I guess).

For those who are coming from React side of the world, Vue is just a nightmare. God!! I was missing React so much <3. (No offence to Vue lovers)

But I feel this is what I went for, learning new stuff. And thanks to Wikimedia, I got to learn how Vue works. Also this could help me in future projects as most of the Wikimedia projects are written in Vue and PHP (modern day tools are written in Vue, legacy is PHP).

I mean Codex, the new design system Wiki is coming up with, is also written in Vue, and supports in built Vue UI components. Do check it out here

Day 4⌗

The final day. Yes!!. We worked.. We went out, then worked again (this cycle went on for almost 2 days). We basically improved the tool’s code base, improved the UI, migrated the repo from Github to Gitlab, hosted the tool on Toolforge, and then we were done.

Feel free to check it out here: https://yearinreview.toolforge.org/

And it was time for the group photo.

Look at all the pretty faces :-)

PS: These photos are taken from Wikimedia Commons, an open source, open licensed, media repository by Wikimedia.

Thank you all⌗

Again couldn’t be more thankful to Wikimedia, for providing this opportunity, to meet new people, get to talk to them, learn from them.

Thank you Gopa, Parthiv, Jon for helping me out with the tool. I couldn’t have done it without you guys.

And now we’re off. Until next time.