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

[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!)

[deborah]

I wonder how well Google hangout or Skype would work for pair programming. I've used Skype to solve puzzles together, and while it's nowhere near as good as solving in person, it works pretty well.

[misskat]

Grow Stuff has/is working on a pair programming app thing, and may have better info on how it works via skype.

[alexbayleaf]

Yup, Growstuff uses Skype + Teamviewer (or possibly tmux if both people are working on the same linux box). There's more detail about how we do it at http://wiki.growstuff.org/index.php/Pairing

The app we're building, Pear, is basically a matchmaking service for people who would like to pair program together, because we found it hard to keep track of who was interested and what timezones they're in. You can find out more about it at http://wiki.growstuff.org/index.php/Pear or see it in (fairly low-key) action at http://pear.growstuff.org/

[shadowspar]

At a previous job, our standard pairing setup was a shared screen session and some kind of voice connection (landline, VOIP, whatever). It's a bandwidth-efficient setup that works very well. screen might be rather arcane for folks who don't have a *nix background, though.

Too, we found that graphical screen-sharing stuff like VNC or Remote Desktopcan be made to work, but it's more bandwidth-intensive and can be annoyingly laggy depending on how good the network connection between collaborators is. That was a few years ago now, though, so hopefully things have improved since. =)

[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. :)