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!

[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.

[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*?

[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

[misskat]

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

[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...

[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. =)

[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/

[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.

[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.

[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".

[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.

[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.

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.

[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.

[alierak]

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

[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

[mykindofgeek]

Thanks for narrowing it down for me! I'll pick something from your list of suggestions and hopefully get a start on it this weekend. :)

[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. :)

[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. :)

[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!

[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. :)

[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!)