Welcome to Karzilla!

[denise]

Step one of our plan for making sure everything afuna was doing gets covered: we're going to be splitting up her role somewhat. Afuna was doing many things, but the two that were in frequent conflict, in terms of demands on her time, was the dichotomy between managing pull requests/reviewing code/encouraging new folks, and working on her own major projects. We'll be splitting those into two separate positions to hopefully minimize some of that tension!

I'm very pleased to announce that kareila has agreed to take on the first half of that set of duties: she will be our new volunteer developer coordinator. (Which totally needs a more pithy name.) For just about as long as DW has existed, Jen's been doing a ton of mentoring and encouraging. She's been a code committer in the past, and I know she's looking forward to getting back to that, but she's also been damn good at recognizing people who are doing great work. She's also great at lending a helping hand when someone needs one -- and more than that, at recognizing when the hand is necessary. Both mark and I are confident she'll be a fabulous fit in the role.

I know she has a ton of great ideas about how we can improve the contributing process for our volunteer devs, and I don't want to steal her thunder for when she gets up and running, but I was so excited that I wanted to share the good news with y'all as soon as we nailed down the details. Welcome to karzilla, newly be-hatted!

Comments

[karzilla]

Fantastic! Let me know what you're interested in working on and I'll help you get the ball rolling! I've also got some ideas for keeping people better informed; stay tuned!

[liv]

The thing I'm probably most use at is stuff to make working with S2 easier, both for users and developers. Potentially slightly automating some of the stuff where we have to make a change to every single layout individually, like the things in kaberett's babydev bait list where they say This is additionally tagged effort-higher, but that's because it's a small change that needs applying in an awful lot of places.. Also using S2 functions to calculate 2X the sidebar width, rather than asking users to input 1X sidebar width and 2X width separately. Tidying up the S2 customization wizard in a range of ways; if I get really ambitious, I would like to make a much easier way of using someone else's pre-made style, whether that's CSS or S2.

There's also couple of odd little accessibility things have been itches for a while, such as allowing spell-check in the subject field of the post entry page.

Basically what I'm already good at is awkward S2 stuff; I can do conversions of submitted themes and styles if that's a help, but I know there's a few people already working on that, so I'm probably more valuable doing bits that are somewhere in the grey area between actual styles and backend. And I'd like to learn more about parts of the codebase that aren't the style system, perhaps by starting with some of the one-line fix / babydev bugs.

[karzilla]

This sounds like an excellent plan! Depending on where you want to start, I would suggest assigning yourself to one of the relevant S2 bugs, by leaving a comment that says something like "claimed" or "claiming this". I see you already have a Github account - do you need a refresher on getting your copy of the repository up to date?

Also, feel free to go ahead and open new issues on Github for the other improvements you have in mind!

[ninetydegrees]

Also using S2 functions to calculate 2X the sidebar width, rather than asking users to input 1X sidebar width and 2X width separately.

Omg yes please!