Chris McMahon's Blog

Some years ago I had the privilege of making some suggestions for Brian Marick's book Everyday Scripting based on the first article I ever wrote for Better Software magazine.  That article appeared in 2004, and I just recently ran into a similar situation at work.  Wikipedia is localized for well over 100 languages.  I had only been working at Wikimedia Foundation a couple of weeks when I heard that discrepancies between the localized message files from version to version could cause problems when upgrading.  I didn't know what kind of problems, but since we're upgrading all the Wikipedia wikis to version 1.19, that sounded like sort of a big deal, so I followed up. It turns out that changes to the localization files are essentially undocumented, no tools exist to monitor such changes, and we simply did not know anything about discrepancies in those files.  So I decided it would be useful to look into that. You can find the Wikipedia localization files for version

I've been pretty quiet in recent times, but that's going to change somewhat in 2012, so I thought I'd write this(*) to catch up. As of last week, I am the QA Lead for the Wikimedia Foundation . My job there will be to create, codify, and execute the software testing and quality assurance regimes for the software that powers Wikipedia and its associated properties. I've worked some other interesting places, among them Thoughtworks and Socialtext . I like open source and wikis. I have been a dedicated telecommuter/remote worker since 2006. Depending on when you read this, I'm in either Santa Fe NM or Durango CO, or somewhere else. I have written about software a lot. Most of my writing in recent times has been for SearchSoftwareQuality.com   (warning: registration wall), but I've also written a lot for StickyMinds.com   and a couple of articles for PragPub .   I wrote a chapter for Beautiful Testing . I created the Writing About Testing peer confere