New Year's Resolutions

[denise]

Mark and I were talking tonight about "ninja releasing" little things that are heavily-asked-for features or bugfixes/UI improvements, and I thought it might be cool to do a "New Year's Resolutions" type thing in the next news post: show the link to the effort-minor Bugzilla search and let people name the one thing they most want to see, then browse the list and try to implement as many of them as we can during January.

Would anybody be interested in coding for that type of hackathon?

Comments

[stuntpilot99]

I'm tempted to say yes to this... Quite like to get involved a little (though my time is a bit limited), to sharpen up my perl.

Depends on the scale / complexity of what's available.

Oh, and I've only been here a day and not had a look how scary and spaghetti like the code-base is yet. :)

[foxfirefey]

People who know the code base are more than happy to go dive into available bugs and come up with a good "baby" bug (which is what we call good intro bugs, regardless of a newcomer's experience or age)--we can even narrow it down to an area of interest.

[stuntpilot99]

Sounds like a nice let in then - I've a decent background - just little perl.

[denise]

You should be good to go, then!

[denise]

The codebase is scary, but not as scary as it used to be. Now the eldritch horrors only lurk in a few places. *G*

Seriously though, if you want to get involved people will leap all over themselves to point you in the right direction. The bug tracker is http://bugs.dwscoalition.org, dw_dev and dw_dev_training are the comms (former, aka this comm, for general discussion, the latter to help people who are very new to perl or to programming and who feel uncomfortable asking their questions in the 'main' comm), and the wiki, especially the development category, have more info. We also offer hosted developer environments so you don't have to fuck around with installing the code yourself, because trust me, that is an eldritch horror.

[stuntpilot99]

Trust me - you have a very high bar to clear to rate as the worst code-mess I've ever had to work on. ('twas php that only had functions in third party code. Objects? Don't make me laugh! Why are historic records from 5 years ago changing when I update next year's tax rate? Why is this calculation copy/paste in five places? Why are they all different?) *shudder*

I've a boat load of C, C++ and Java on *nix, agile, refactoring etc etc, with opinions on UI/UX but have lately been doing entirely management, and a whole slew of non-technical things, along with a spell as CTO at a recession killed startup (of course a whole ton of that was answering the phone, firefighting, joining in with support, designing brochures, selling and all the other startup type things that the T in CTO meant I shouldn't have to do :)

Perl? Not much, but, well it isn't exactly a hard migration (famous last words)

Seems like you're well organised around here :)

[denise]

*giggle* You should do just fine, then. We've done a lot of work to clean up the 10+ years of legacy Perl (it's been kind of awesome to go back and fix all the things we always wanted to, even if we do wind up facepalming at our younger selves and our former coworkers a lot) and paying a lot of our technical debt. Perpetual task, but we're at least having fun while we're doing it!

And hey, my job title is technically CEO, and I spent a bunch of today deleting spam. As a friend of mine points out, you can always tell the boss at a small business: they're the ones washing the signs in the parking lot on Sunday morning. *G*

Anyway, the hardest part for you should be getting familiar with the architecture, etc. The code's at http://hg.dwscoalition.org but I really do recommend the hosted developer environments -- it takes a lot of the hassle out of it.