Dreamwidth Development

August's usability hackathon went awesomely! 42 bugs keyworded why-usability had some action, and 22 of them were resolved, which gives us a huge usability boost. Point bounties will be sent out as soon as I can con someone into doing it for me get a chance to put together the transfers.

September's hackathon will be for bugs keyworded from-suggestions. The points bounty will be:

10 points for effort-minor
50 points for effort-medium
100 points for effort-major

There are currently 336 open bugs keyworded from-suggestions, and 274 of them are unassigned. I'd love it if we could get those numbers down by at least 10% -- which would be 303 open, 247 unassigned -- or even more. There's been a number of new suggestions added to Bugzilla in the past few weeks, so give the bug lists a wander through and see if anything really strikes you!

fu and I have been discussing a bit about what our concentration over the next few months should be, and so I would like to share this with y'all in case you're looking for some direction or inspiration on what bugs or projects you should be working on!

The past 6-9 months have been concentrating heavily on two things: a) backend cleanup and/or modernization to make interest payments on our technical debt, and b) extensive work on our style system, both in the form of new themes/new styles and improvement on the S2 backend as a whole. Don't get me wrong -- these are both great projects, and I love them to bits! (The former because it helps everyone down the line, making our codebase cleaner and more modern; the latter because we started at a distinct disadvantage in terms of available themes and styles, and the easier we make it for people to not only find a style or theme they like but to make themes and styles on their own, the better.) However, it's been a while since we've had any sort of concentrated push on frontend feature development and the overall user experience, and in order to make Dreamwidth a success, I think it's time for us as a team to band together and really make a push towards user-facing improvements.

To that end, I am declaring the major development focus during the remainder of 2011 to be "Mission: Feature Development". This doesn't mean you can't (or shouldn't) work on backend stuff, cleanup projects, code modernization, themes, styles, or S2 backend stuff if that's where your interests lie -- just that if you're looking for a project or a bug to pick up, and you're undecided about what you should work on, it would be most helpful to Dreamwidth-the-project if you picked up something user-facing or new-feature-development.

What sort of things do I mean when I say "user-facing or feature development?"

* Frontend usability tweaks to make the experience of interacting with DW more pleasant for the user -- things that are keyworded why-usability in Bugzilla.

* Accessibility improvements, to help DW be more usable by people who are using assistive technology or who need some sort of accomodation to make their experience of DW workable -- things that are keyworded why-accessibility in Bugzilla.

* New features for paid users, or things that have higher limits for paid users, or things that improve on paid features, or other things that will enhance the concept of a paid account -- things keyworded paiduser-enhancement in Bugzilla.

* Things that users have directly asked for or suggested, to improve their DW experience -- things that are keyworded from-suggestions in Bugzilla.

The idea, basically, is to spend the rest of the year in a heavy development push towards banging out new shiny things -- whether they're major or minor, huge new features or little tweaks to the user experience -- that will show people that we're improving the way they use the service and making things that extend the core function of DW in new and exciting ways.

If people would find it helpful, I can make lists of bugs that I think would fall into this category, for illustrative purposes! Also, as individual months go by, I'll be declaring "sub-projects" -- things I'd like to concentrate on in that particular month. (For instance, declaring one month to be a concentration on accessibility-improvement bugs, suggestions, etc.)

For August, I'd like to concentrate on usability improvements -- making it easier to get DW to do what people want it to do. To that end, any patch for a bug keyworded why-usability, from now to the end of August, will have a points bounty:

10 points for effort-minor
50 points for effort-medium
100 points for effort-major

Patch need not be committed before 31 August, just coded and submitted by then.

Let's kick some usability butt!

It's time for our next hackathon! The suggestions hackathon did really well in getting people inspired to clear out some older stuff, so I thought, what about clearing out some really old stuff?

From now until May 30, patching a bug with a Bugzilla ID number under 2000 (so, 1-1999) will earn 10 DW points if it's effort-minor, 50 if it's effort-medium, and 100 if it's effort-major. Patching a bug with a three-digit or less Bugzilla ID (1-999) will carry a 50% points bonus (so, 15 for effort-minor, 75 effort-medium, 150 effort-major).

I know a lot of the older bugs are huge epic things (major projects we logged up front), but many of them are smaller fixes! There's even a codemerge or two. Check out the unassigned bugs and see if there's an older bug you can give some love to.

The two-year anniversary of open beta launch is coming up at the end of April, and therefore it is time to start thinking about how we will celebrate!

One of the things I want to do is see how many "gifts to our users" we can provide before then, and what better way to do that than to take a look at some of the suggestions they've made. Right now we have 300 unassigned suggestions (thanks in part to a suggestions run this week!) and 332 open suggestions total, and I'd love to knock those numbers down to the 225-250 range.

So, it is time for the March Suggestions Hackathon. Grab an unassigned suggestion! Hack away!

In fact, from now until March 31, I will be putting a bounty on all suggestions bugs. :) For every patch submitted to a bug tagged 'from-suggestions' that is also tagged effort-minor, I'll give you 10 points; for effort-medium, 50 points, and for effort-major, 100 points. First draft of patches must be submitted from now to 31 March but may be revised/reviewed/committed aftewards.

(And, in celebration, I'm claiming a few myself. Despite not having coded anything in like five months. COVER ME, I'M GOING IN.)

With 42 hours (or so) left in the June hackathon, our numbers are:

All open: 612 (down from 616)
All resolved: 2134 (up from 2123)

Final push! Grab something and code it, or grab something and review it, and let's get over that line :)

With six days left in the June Hackathon:

All open: 633 (down from 681)
All resolved: 2104 (up from 1987)

Six days left to go to get that number under 600 open bugs! Check the lists of unassigned effort-minor bugs and unassigned from-suggestions bugs, and see what you can do; or, help out our committers and do some code review. (Current needs-review count: 28!)

(And, someone brought up the fact that they don't see the same numbers I see -- the missing count in your Bugzilla queries are security-issues bugs, things that are kept quiet until they are committed because they are possible security problems. There are three of 'em with patches waiting for review and the rest are open, so it's probably better if you aim for slightly under 600.)

I totally know we can make it, even if we do keep opening up new bugs as we go. *G* 33 bugs in 6 days is well within our range!

So, the other day I took a look at our number of open bugs (currently 689) and resolved bugs (currently 1948) and realized: it was time for a hackathon!

For this one, since Mark's time is really constrained this month and Fu will be doing most of the review/commit work in addition to her other duties, we're going to concentrate on whacking the little stuff: the effort-minor bugs, the half-an-hour fixes, the small UI tweaks, the little bits of code cleanup, etc. This isn't to say that you can't do the bigger stuff if you want, just that the priority for this month should be blazing through all the small, quickly-fixed pieces. (If we were a different kind of project, someone would be using the phrase "low-hanging fruit" right about now.) We also welcome, and in fact encourage, people to be doing code review of others' patches as well as code work.

My goal is to get the open count under 600 open bugs by June 30. (This will also mean that we'll surpass 2000 resolved bugs, too. Which will be awesome.)

To help keep track, I'll be posting regular progress reports! If you've been thinking about picking up a bug or two, now's the time to do it. And if you're working on something huge, why not take an afternoon and knock out some little things?

We've got Bugzilla searches for unassigned effort-minor bugs and unassigned from-suggestions bugs (many of which are quick hits too).

Let's get cracking; I totally know we can knock those numbers down like whoa if we really give it a shot. :)

I checked tonight, and we've got 571 open bugs. That's a lot! 146 of them are assigned with no patch, and if we could make some inroads on that number, we'd be able to knock down the total open number a hell of a lot.

So, here's my hackathon challenge! If you've got assigned bugs, let's do whatever we can this week to get that number down. I'll start; I have 8 bugs assigned to me without a patch, and while some of them are waiting on other things to get resolved first, some of them are things I've just been putting off because I don't know exactly how to do them or was running into problems.

I've already yelled for help on what I'm stuck on, so I'll turn to y'all: what can I help you with on stuff you're stuck on? And if not me, who else can help you? A bunch of the existing assigned stuff is really complex, so let's all work together and see how much we can improve things.

Ideally, I'd like to get that "open" number down below 500 by Sunday night, and double ideally, the "all unassigned" number (currently at 386) down under 300.

*salutes you all*

I am calling for a fixit marathon!

Currently, there are 472 open bugs (354 unassigned; 118 assigned). I think we can totally get that down to 400 or fewer open bugs by next Monday (July 6) if we really dig into things, even if more bugs get opened up.

To that end, I'm declaring a Fixit Marathon. While mark works on reading filters this weekend, let's see what else we can do.

I pledge to fix five bugs this weekend! Who's with me?