A little organization and updates!

[mark]

Hi all!

I've been doing some poking around and realized that I don't have a good overall state-of-the-DW-development. I have some vague ideas about what some people are working on and interested in, but I wanted to make those vague ideas become a bit less vague. :)

If you have a few minutes, I'd appreciate you taking the time to answer a couple of quick questions here!

1. Are you actively working on a bug (or several) right now? Which ones?
2. What are you interested in working on -- broadly or narrowly, what do you want to do? (Or are you just open for suggestions?)
3. Is there anything explicitly blocking you from doing what you want? (Knowledge, someone has the bug claimed for a year, need a hand with something, etc.)
4. Free form! Anything you want to say or ask. :)

I also want us to have another development focused chat like we did some months ago. I think the last one I did was well timed for US developers but bad for EU, so I'll go the other way this time. I'm thinking something like 8AM Pacific which is midnight for fu and 4PM UTC on a Sunday. Reasonable?

Thanks!

Comments

[deborah]

1. Hopefully within a few days I'll have a proposed patch for bug 3448.

2. Accessibility. I'm predictable. :-)!

3. I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.no, seriously. I've gotten rid of several time constraints that were keeping me from coding and now I'm feeling pretty set.

4. Hooray Mark!

[mark]

Oh cool -- that feature will be nice to have implemented. I often run w/o Flash and it'd be nice to see what is going on.

Accessibility stuff is awesome. Predictable or not, it's fantastic to have someone so knowledgeable and willing to work on it. Thank you!

Yay Deborah! Thanks for answering my questions. :)

[denise]

seconding mark, i'm so incredibly proud of our commitment to improving site accessibility wherever possible, and you're definitely one of the reasons we can do that. you are awesome for caring so much about it and i'm so glad we have you.

[randomling]

1. I have a small stack of bugs assigned to me. My current project is Bug 4242, which is in fact mostly done, except for one thing I want to add to it.

2. I am really open to suggestions! I'm a very newbie programmer and at some distant point in the future I'd kind of like to make this my job, so it would be awesome to get an idea of as many different aspects as I can. In terms of personal satisfaction, I really like doing front-end patches where I can point to a new feature and say "I made this!" but I'm also open to tooling around in the backend.

3. I feel a bit pathetic about this, because mostly what I need is a bit of hand-holding and cheerleading while I try to make stuff work with my last little bit of this bug? (And probably with future bugs too, 'cause having someone around to bounce ideas off is really helpful.) I know I can always ask for this, but I get really worried I'm going to wear you guys out, so I don't ask (and then I don't hack!). Sigh, my brain. So I suppose it would be awesome to hear that asking for help is okay, even though I know it and you know I know it?

4. I'm not sure what else to say here except sorry for being so wibbly and insecure. You guys are ♥

That sounds like a great time for a chat, at least for me!

[denise]

asking for cheerleading is ALWAYS okay! and encouraged! and don't worry that you're bothering people -- if they don't have the time/energy/social oompf necessary to help out, they can just say 'sorry, can't right now' and it's all good. <3

but you totally should feel comfortable asking. and if there's nobody in irc who can help at any given time, post to dw_dev_training! you don't even need to explain the full details of the thing you're struggling with, even -- it's perfectly ok to say "hey, i'm kind of wrestling with the last little bits of this thing and could use somebody with experience in X and Y to be a sounding board/cheerleader; could someone help?" and then you can make an appointment or something. :)

but really, it's not an imposition! in fact, pair programming is a huge thing. (we don't do it as much because it's harder to do remotely, but it's definitely a thing!)

[mark]

Oh yeah -- that bug will be nice to have solved. :)

I know Denise already mentioned that it's okay to ask for cheerleading, but I wanted to mention that too. It's always okay to ask! On IRC, in comments, whatever. This is a team and that means we support each other -- and not just in 'how does this work' types of questions.

It's awesome that you're working on that bug and I really appreciate your willingness to ask for help and to hack on things. I am glad that you are volunteering for Dreamwidth; it's nice to have you. :)

[momijizukamori]

1) I haven't been doing much in the last couple of months because Life Is Scary and it's easier to stick my head in the sand (by which I mean run off and just read comics), but I'm theoretically working on patching somew new layouts, the S2 siteview comment pages, carrying custom text through layouts, having a 'no icon' option even with default set, and having style categories that make sense.

2) Styles stuff! But I'd like to learn more Perl and dive into Javascript, and I've been kind of poking at some bugs with more of that.

3) For patched styles - reviews. We've got a backlog going back to last summer, iirc. For the perl patches I've been banging my head on, I need someone more knowledgable to have a look-see to figure out what I'm doing that's not working.

4) Anyone in the PacNW want to hire me so I can stop panicking about my life *g*?

[mark]

I hear you about life.

I'll see about helping Afuna with the backend/Perl reviews so she can have some more time to focus on the frontend ones.

I really want to get you further into the Perl things. You seem perfectly placed in skills and interest to take the next steps and start getting into more core functionality -- frontend or backend! :)

Do you have any specific links for Perl things you've been working on and would like a hand with? You can also hop in IRC and PM me or ping me in #dreamwidth-dev and I'd be happy to help if I'm around!

[exor674]

1. I'm trying to finish OAuth. ( except see 3 )

2. N/A

3. School is eating my life. :( -- on a more project-related, I really need help with the UI stuff, as user-facing stuff is a huge stress-point for me.

4. Can we clone me so I can have a Dre dedicated to just doing DW work? :P <3

[mark]

I certainly understand priorities. It's sad for us that school has eaten you, but it's good to be doing it and we aren't going anywhere. I look forward to the future where you get more time available. There's lots of stuff to do, and your skill with the backend projects is definitely missed!

Cloning ... well, I haven't gotten that to work yet ... maybe oneday. :)

[denise]

if i ever work out the bugs on that whole "uploading myself to the matrix" thing, i will be happy to lend you the technology so you can run multiple instances at once :)

[kareila]

1. 215 & 177, for very generous definitions of "active" meaning I have unsubmitted work done.
2. I like to work on Perl-heavy, mostly backend stuff. I can do SQL queries, I can do UI/CSS in a pinch, I've kind of learned my way around S2, and I can debug JS sometimes... but Perl is my happy place.
3. Lots of other more urgent commitments, but I've recently backed off on a lot of other things to make more time for DW. Not quite there yet, but I'm hoping by April.
4. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

On a Sunday, that's when I'm generally at church, so I'd probably have to show up late. Any other time on a Sunday would be fine...

[mark]

It'd be really nice to get 215 in, and I know Denise wants 177. Is there something I can do to help with them, or is it mostly waiting on the vagaries of life?

Commitments -- yeah, it seems that it's a busy time for lots of people. I'm trying to do the same sort of dance to reprioritize and/or cut things so that I have more time to work on DW. It's working... slowly, though. Honestly half of my problem is just saying "and now I'm going to focus on DW" instead of "hey, I could go play EVE!" Heh.

Re: meeting, I was a little worried about doing Saturday since people might have plans. I'd like to have you there if possible, though, so perhaps Saturday is the better day. (Or perhaps I will just have to do it twice!)

[mykindofgeek]

Hi!

1. No, but I'd like to be. :) In November I followed all the step-by-step instructions for getting started, but I got lost at the 'pick a bug' phase. I don't know which bug to pick or how I would go about working on it once it has been chosen.

2. I'm not sure. I'd like to do something that would help me learn Perl or Javascript. Right now the only thing I have a really solid grasp of is HTML and CSS, but solving CSS issues doesn't really inspire me very much.

3. General newbie skittishness. Step-by-step instructions are easy enough, but right now I feel like I'm in a fog bank and I can't see an obvious way forward.

4. I'm in my first year of a two year IT certificate program. I feel like I am being taught intro level things over and over and over again and that there's a giant hurdle between intro level course work and real work and I don't know how to get myself over it. I feel like it's the difference between looking at a map vs. going for a walk.

[denise]

the best way to find a bug is to hit up the all-unassigned bugzilla query and skim through for something that looks interesting!

we're kind of low on "bitesized" bugs at the moment, but i've gone on a quick skim and here are some bugs that might work for you:

http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2871
http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4739
http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4658 (if you're on a mac)
http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4304
http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4583
http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4328

there's also starting out with patching layout themes, which is a good way to get started on something that's very well-documented and getting used to the process of making changes, working with git, generating pull requests, etc. for that, look in bugzilla for "new themes" bugs.

for getting started with perl, there are free online resources, but the o'reilly book "learning perl" is probably one of the better ones. if you keep an eye out, o'reilly will run occasional discounts, and you can get it in ebook or print form.

[mark]

Hi -- welcome to Dreamwidth development! Pleased to meet you. :)

Denise has given lots of good advice and some suggestions about picking a bug, so I won't dabble too much on that. I will say that you're always welcome to ping us and ask for advice on a bug, or for suggestions. We're happy to point you in the right direction or talk your ear off about implementing things!

Perl and JS are very different languages with different focuses. If you want to do frontend development, JS will serve you better. For backend stuff, Perl. Since you know HTML and CSS, frontend might be a better match -- but it all depends on where you want to go with your skills. It's always good to have a variety and learn lots of things!

The way forward, generally:

1. Have your hack environment setup (sounds like you do)
2. Find a bug that is interesting and someone says is easy (there's a list below!)
3. Figure out where in the code this bug sits (you can search with 'grep' or you can look through files or you can ask) -- this is sometimes the hardest part, don't be afraid to ask for help!
4. Make a change to fix it
5. Test your change on your hack environment
6. If the bug is fixed, submit a pull request
7. Wait for a review!

The last step ... I believe we have the documentation on the wiki. Afuna/Denise, do you have a link handy?

Totally ask for help, though! Then help make sure the documentation is good. If something is lacking, edit it and submit some clarifications. It is very much appreciated and another great way of getting familiar with the process.

Whew -- there, I've rambled at you. Welcome again. :)

[jewelfox]

In between disability things, I am ideating towards a Firefox plugin and/or Firefox app, which could be a replacement for / tie into a mobile site version. I'd also love a native Android app.

[mark]

An app would be fantastic! I know that many people want one -- myself included, although I use iOS right now. We're always here for help with the API and design and ideas and such, although we don't have a lot of client-side experience around.

When you get started on things, you should post and tell us what you need! We'll see what we can do. :)

[purplecat]

1. Right now I'm working on Bug 3117 (Icons can't have keywords starting with 0). I started work on it some months ago but then got side-tracked into making changes to the bug fix for 2152 (multiple stickies) for which I submitted a pull request last week (finally). I'm hoping 3117 should be fairly easy (!)

2. Longer term I've been eyeing up the various bugs related to exporting journals in various formats. There seems to be a fair bit of work involved there but it's something I'd be interested in taking a look at.

3. Time really, though also just generally working with a large code base which I don't work with intensively enough to just know where stuff is (I keep having to check back my notes). And for 2152 Template Toolkit turned out to have a surprisingly steep learning curve for me.

4. I've found the Most Wanted Bug List helpful when looking for a project to tackle. I keep thinking I should check out the IRC more, but I'm not really a good "chatter".

[mark]

Bug 3117 is pretty funny -- I wonder how that got in there! I'd be interested in seeing the fix when you get it sorted.

Exporting is definitely a big project. I don't know how much detail we have on any bugs that are open for it, but I definitely recommend making it something that runs external to the core service. I.e., build it using the APIs and use that as a tug to make the APIs better if they're deficient.

(I'm assuming that with a skill level capable of handling journal exports, you can handle some API stuff! And hey, we're here to help if you get stuck or need a hand with that!)

I totally agree about IRC. I'm there all of the time, but for the life of me I can't chat. Maybe at my best I can spend a few minutes doing some small-talk, but I always end up wandering off and getting sidetracked into other things. I feel bad about it, heh.

Thanks for taking the time to comment and to work on Dreamwidth! :)

[allen]

Oh, right.

1. Have picked up bug 210 again. I hadn't touched it in several months, so between the github move and general code skew, I'm just getting it back to the point it had been. Hoping to make more progress soon.

2. I think I might go for a more medium-sized task next time. :)

3. Time. Size of project.

4. Sunday at 11 AM Eastern is tricky for me. 9 or 1 would work.

[mark]

Hah, yes; you do seem to enjoy taking the large things and making them Happen. That's fantastic, though, and I'm really glad to have folks like you around who can take on a big project and get it done. :)

Would Saturdays be better? I don't want to conflict with family day/church/etc and my reason for avoiding Saturdays (I have plans) is just a conflict every other Saturday so I can schedule around them.

Let's play tricks with DST sir!

[pauamma]

4pm UTC on Sundays (on most any day of the week, actually) works for me. But. This year, the US goes to DST on March 10 (sez Wikipedia), and European countries on March 31 (ditto). So 4pm UTC will actually be 9am Pacific starting on Sunday March 10, not 8am. Since this one is European-centric, I'd suggest keeping the 4pm UTC time. That would additionally help people who said they'd be at church or otherwise occupied at 11am Eastern time. (If you meant to have it on March 31 or later, ignore what I wrote above.)

Note: I'm not available on March 17, so that would leave March 10 or March 24 for me.

Re: Let's play tricks with DST sir!

[mark]

Thanks for the heads up! I forgot DST was this weekend. That's actually ... important ... as I have early Monday morning plans that involve coordinating with Europe (CET). Narrowly dodged a bullet there...

I'm thinking Saturdays would be better given Sundays seem to be church/family day/etc. I don't know, maybe there's no winning. I'll just have to schedule something and see how it goes...

Perhaps the best plan is to schedule it far enough out that there is plenty of time for people to plan to attend?

[ninetydegrees]

1 - Not really but I'm always more or less working on styles in some way or another when I have time and motivation. Style work can be time-consuming and repetitive so I like taking breaks to avoid burnout. :)

2 - I like styles, I like small bugs but everything's interesting. The only barriers for me are knowledge and time.

3 - Well, as I said, knowledge and time. I have to drop some bugs from time to time because I can't go any further or what I tried didn't work or because it's too big a project. This isn't a big issue for me, though. IT isn't my field; I'm always happy to learn new stuff but I don't want this to become a full-time hobby and being limited in what I can do is a very efficient way not to fall into that trap. I hope that makes sense. What else? Having a few more people work in styles would help too as it's hard to concentrate on bigger projects when themes and styles keep piling up. Hmm. Oh, workers. There are bugs I can't work on, even very simple ones, because I can't test things on my hack. Wiki entries about how to make them work would be very helpful I believe.

4 - It's good hearing from you. How are you and your family?

Edit: re: chat time. Depends on the date. If I work Sunday evenings aren't always a good time for me.

[mark]

Avoiding burnout: a skill not many people have, myself included. Congrats on figuring out that particular trick!

It makes sense re: having some limits so that this can remain a hobby. It works out pretty well for DW though since you're good at working with the styles system, which not many people have the patience/expertise for.

I'll see what we can get put together re: the workers. I thought we had something, but apparently not! They're not super difficult to run, the problem is mostly just knowing which ones to do. Do you know if you've set up TheSchwartz or not? (Or if hack sets it up by default? I am not sure.)

My family and I are great! Oliver is cruising around with reckless abandon and starting to chatter -- not words, but just excited baby-talk -- it's really quite adorable. Henry is a handful, but he's three and I'm told that's supposed to happen; and to be fair, he's quite wonderful, it's just easy to mention the tantrums. This morning we were all sitting down and eating breakfast and Henry looked up from his cheerios and said "We're a family!" and I got tears in my eyes. It was just awesome.

I, on the other hand, am busy and crazy and don't stop moving until I pass out. Day job, Dreamwidth, family, flight lessons, 2 LARPs, 2 sit-down RPGs, ... I have packed myself to bursting. I'm actually shuffling some of these off to the "minimum attention" pile and debating flat-out cutting some and, for sure, some are temporary. I keep myself busy and yet that seems to be how I run best. High octane -- go go go.

Thanks for answering my questions! I'll definitely post up about the dev meeting chat but it will be an advanced notice; there will be plenty of notice!

[alierak]

I'm actively procrastinating on a bug, does that count?

[mark]

You're also keeping an eye on the servers and fixing the myriad bone-headed mistakes I seem to have made recently. I'd like to claim that I'm just trying to keep you on your toes, but that would just be to try to salvage a small part of my ego... ;)

Thanks again for all of your hard work on the infrastructure. I don't know how we'd survive without your help. (Without me going crazy.)

[shadowspar]

1. Not at the moment! I'm (hopefully) just at the point of squaring away some stuff in my personal life that was eating a lot of my time.
2. Long-term, I'm thinking about pulling together some kind of "build" system that'll turn a bare VM into a working Dreamwidth install. I'm also interested in looking at testing and what the best direction to go with that might be. For starters, though, I just want to pull my dev-env back together and knock off some straightforward bugs while I get a feel for the codebase. ^_^;
3. Honestly, at this point it all pivots on me managing to stake out a place in my schedule in the face of the competing demands for my time. =/
4. "The code done yesterday should be as good as you could make it yesterday. The fact that you know more today, and are more capable today, is good news about today, not bad news about yesterday." :Ron Jeffries

[mark]

I hope you get stuff set up and get some time -- always good to have more people hacking on DW. :)

The bare-VM-to-DW is getting a bit easier since I did the extlib work. This lets you use cpanm to install the Perl packages you need to a local directory. You may even be able to run DW completely out of a user's directory now. The only piece I haven't messed with is the Apache; you could make a build script and then set up the configs locally and everything else should run.

Oh, and MySQL. You'd either need a system database or run a locally installed MySQL under the user's account. Of course I'm not sure if you want to set something up to install in a user's directory on a shared VM, or if you want a "configure the whole VM" kind of thing. Either way would be an interesting project.

Yessssssssss -- time is hard. Well, whatever you get for DW is awesome, and whatever you don't we will be jealous of! ;)

That's a good quote, although it's difficult not to look at old code and go "I SHOULD REWRITE IT". At least, it's a difficult problem for me, I really enjoy going back and fixing old code of mine...

[swaldman]

Late to the party here due to the new-house-no-internets dance, but:

1. My focus for a little while has been adding the ability for DW to tweet notifications of new entries. This is with Fu for review in a draft form at the moment, and I'm glad to say that its blocking bugs have been fixed :-)

Once it's in it should be fairly straightforward to add other sites that use OAuth (only Tumblr springs to mind, but there are probably others) and I may well take that on. However, a IMHO blocker for wider other-sites support is a redesign of the Other Sites settings page - I've bodged Twitter in, but with any more sites it would get very unwieldy. This probably needs input from somebody with considerably more front-end ability than me. There is an existing bug for this, but I forget the number ;-)

2. While the twitter thing is (by my standards) a fairly significant feature, my general comfort zone is to swat the little bugs to leave the more capable people free to look at bigger things :-) To this end, I'm always open to suggestions of little things that would be really helpful to have fixed. In the past I've picked up things that have caused a number of support tickets.

3. See above re Other Sites settings UI.

4.
a) My input will decrease significantly from about a fortnight ago, due to starting a phd. However, once I'm up and running on that I hope to not be totally absent. (I am totally absent now owing to having no connectivity in my new house).
b) As I discussed with fu on IRC a little while ago, I think it would be nice to have occasional posts from you guys outlining the big picture of where you see development going - what are the priorities at present, what's happening, and so forth. Things sometimes seem a little opaque. (this is intended as a suggestion rather than as a complaint!)
c) There was something else I was going to say, but I have completely forgotten what it was.

4pm on a Sunday sounds good for me. As much notice as possible would be helpful!

[swaldman]

Since I got around to looking them up,
The bug to add Twitter support is 4504. The one for a new Other Sites UI is 3590.

I finally finished my questionaaaaaire

[foxfirefey]

#1. Are you actively working on a bug (or several) right now? Which ones?

Okay here are my main things right now:

* Converting BML to TT. I'm getting better at it as I go. My current branch is converting the advanced customization area to TT, and it's almost done. I have also been converting pieces of the admin area to TT. To help others who will need to make TT pages, I have started a instructional cookbook.

* Making a jquery mobile version of the site. Have been blocked by all of the comment loading logic residing in S2 and not wanting to duplicate it, but have gotten good advice from mark (YOOOOU) on abstracting that logic out into DW::Logic. I'm going to work on that part next.

* Trying to get the dreamhack system back up and running with our new git setup. This is a subject where I am very over my head but Sophie has a great set up, so hopefully I can just work from there and get it to a place where we can make new dreamhacks for people. chebe's not working when she was ready and rarin' to go was a big wake up call for me. So far, a new dreamhack repository has been set up, I have a pull request for what I think are the source control files (aka not the checkout of DW code or automatically generated coverage/doc/test output.) I've made an issue to create a development branch on the main dreamwidth repo for it, since that's seemed to work out really great for dw-free; then I can do my development on a git branch. I've checked out a server to work with on DigitalOcean and I'm trying to set up a system there so I can test out the system--I'll note that this seems like a good opportunity to upgrade the OS of the dreamhack server, so I'm using 12.04 as a base. Once I have something that works, we'll need to figure out upgrading the dreamhack system to it.

#2. What are you interested in working on -- broadly or narrowly, what do you want to do? (Or are you just open for suggestions?)

I have broad ranging interests, the abilities to learn what I need to know for them, and my main barrier is time and focus energy.

I want to get rid of BML, I want to have a mobile version of the site. I also have some fantasies
in my head for something I call "cloaking" based on this bug where both entries and comments to a community could be made anonymously, with the backend keeping track. That way, admins could run anonymous communities while still maintaining some degree of of commenting accountability--if membership is moderated, entries/comments are members only, and they can ban an anoymous commentor from commenting without knowing who it is they have banned, then I think there could be a space where anonymous communities could run with more accountability. So, there would be cloaked posts and cloaked comments.

#3. Is there anything explicitly blocking you from doing what you want? (Knowledge, someone has the bug claimed for a year, need a hand with something, etc.)

I will most definitely need help with dreamhack stuff, and people can expect liberal dw_dev posts from me as I try to get it working. I might end up needing review/advice when I work on moving comment display logic from S2 to a DW::Logic place; I know efficiency is extremely important for this code and don't want to end up putting us in a bad position.

#4. Free form! Anything you want to say or ask. :)

HI MARK HI i can totally do some Sunday meeting if I know about it in advance enough to make plans EVEN IF IT IS AT 8AM

Re: I finally finished my questionaaaaaire

[foxfirefey]

also re: #2 sometimes I have fantasies of learning how to do snazzier front end stuff and redoing site sections to modernize them