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

[azurelunatic]

Yay yay yay!!!!

[karzilla]

(Which totally needs a more pithy name.)

I propose DevCom, derived from CapCom: "capsule communicator; a NASA position, the liason between an in-space crew and mission control."

SO EXCITED.

[denise]

SO SHALL IT BE.

[azurelunatic]

And so shall it be documented: http://wiki.dreamwidth.net/wiki/index.php/Common_Jargon#Dreamwidth-Originated

[cesy]

Hooray!

[brainwane]

Thank you, congrats, and welcome.

[kaberett]

Hurrah and welcome!

[momijizukamori]

Welcome!

[allen]

Woo!

Now to get in some dev trouble so I can go asking for help... :)

[ninetydegrees]

Yay! Awesome news!

[kareila]

Bring it on!

[allen]

Is there any way to make Xcode not suck?

[denise]

A question many have asked before you.

[afuna]

I am so excited by what you'll bring to the table. You've always had fantastic ideas for volunteer management and communication and I'm glad you'll now have the time to focus on that and make Dreamwidth better for all our contributors and users <3

KARZILLA SMASH.

[exor674]

sudo rm -rf /Applications/Xcode.app

[allen]

That works, and only makes writing iOS apps slightly more difficult. Much less frustrating, though.

[shadowspar]

[kareila]

Sorry, I only install Xcode for the articles command line tools, so I don't have much in the way of concrete suggestions. A quick Google search reveals several other developers who feel the same pain, though, and one of them linked to an alternative called AppCode. Might be worth a look?

[silverflight8]

Congrats, karzilla/kareila! :D

[liv]

Yay, welcome karzilla! I think having someone whose actual job is coordinating volunteers will make a lot of difference to the project; I've definitely been feeling that it's hard to move forward when the only way to find out what's going on is to pester people. So, karzilla, if you can use someone who's a bit more than a total beginner but still has a lot to learn, here I am reporting for duty.

[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!