Group OS Contribution

[Renae Bair]

Chatted with hustin this week, and we talked about how it might be good for the group to focus our efforts on a project as a group. Would anyone be interested in this? The benefit (aside from the karma points for contributing to open source) would be that we'd be working with each other on something that is relatively low-risk; therefore, if we decide to do a project together afterward that is our own, we have a good understanding of how we each work and function on projects. Plus, it would be fun to be working together on something. 

Thoughts?

--
Renae ~
"For Nature beats in perfect tune,
And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she works in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1847)

[Adam Bair]

I think this is a fantastic idea. I have a MIGHTY NEED for a good
personal finance application. I'd like to throw that idea on the table.

--
Adam Bair

[Dmitri Zagidulin]

I was just thinking about how you mentioned the personal finance app.

I'd love to help out with that!

[Justin Henry]

On Aug 12, 2009, at 10:10 AM, Renae Bair wrote:

> Chatted with hustin this week, and we talked about how it might be
> good for the group to focus our efforts on a project as a group.
> Would anyone be interested in this? The benefit (aside from the
> karma points for contributing to open source) would be that we'd be
> working with each other on something that is relatively low-risk;
> therefore, if we decide to do a project together afterward that is
> our own, we have a good understanding of how we each work and
> function on projects. Plus, it would be fun to be working together
> on something.
>
> Thoughts?

It might also be worth considering contributing to an existing open
source codebase (as opposed to building something and releasing it).

This would have a number of positive effects. It would us to
contribute back to the community directly (i.e. especially if it was a
package we use often); it would allow us to get our names out there
(i.e. we would become part of a larger community); it would let us
start in on small parts of a project, rather than something big (i.e.
we would be dealing with less overhead such as certain project
management details); and it would let us hone workflow skills that we
might not get to do on a project of our own (i.e. our git-fu might
grow better when exposed to the conventions of an active OSS project).

I think we all are accustomed to hacking on our own projects, be they
open or otherwise. Working on a larger project that is owned by a
group of strangers would push us that much farther out of our comfort
zone.

Anyway, some food for thought.

-Justin

[CLR]

+1 to working on an existing OSS project first, then trying something on our own like the personal finance app.  We tried something like that before w/ PROGMATICA and it failed because no one wanted to be pm.

What's something Ruby and/or Rails that we'd all be interested in?  There's been a lot of interest in CouchDB recently.  Let's start an 'ideas' list.

Ideas:
* couchrest <- needs utilities to handle views
* haml <- messy tree structure could be rewritten
* rails <- we could work on edge to make sure 3.0 doesn't suck

-CLR

[Renae Bair]

I agree that working on an external project first would be a good place to start.

My ideas:

Spot.us  - A community funded reporting site. Was actually built by Hashrocket, originally. Would be fun to hack on and supports something fairly interesting. 

Redmine - Open source ticketing system

Renae ~

[Renae Bair]

Add Panda to the idea wall: http://pandastream.com/

It's a service for uploading, encoding and streaming video. Uses EC2 and is a Merb app. 

Renae

[CLR]

+1 for pandastream.  I wonder how easy it is to set up locally ..?  Anyone using it?

-CLR

[CLR]

Quick poll. If the group works on an OS project, what aspect would you
be most interested in working on? Rank order the following:

fixing really broken stuff
making something run faster
adding spiffy new features
cleaning up spaghetti mess
documentation
writing tests

Thanks!
-CLR

[Dmitri Zagidulin]

For myself, I'd rank em in the following order:
1. adding spiffy new features (a tie with:)
1. fixing really broken stuff
2. documentation
3. writing tests
4. cleaning up spaghetti mess
5. making something run faster (way at the bottom)

~Dmitri

On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 4:47 PM, CLR<lot...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Quick poll.  If the group works on an OS project, what aspect would you
> be most interested in working on?  Rank order the following:
>
>
>
>

> Thanks!
> -CLR
>
> >
>

[Renae Bair]

I would be happier to work on a project that is fun. There's got to be a cool OS project out there that we really care about and is fun to work on?

Aspects, ranked:

adding spiffy new features

fixing really broken stuff
making something run faster

cleaning up spaghetti mess

writing tests

documentation

Renae

On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 4:47 PM, CLR <lot...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Adam Bair]

-1 for _really_ broken stuff
-1 for documentation
+1 for spaghetti
+1 for tests

--
Adam Bair

[Adam Bair]

1 cleaning up spaghetti mess
2 writing tests
3 adding spiffy new features
4 fixing really broken stuff
5 documentation
6 making something run faster

--
Adam Bair

[CLR]

Ok, so here is our preliminary criteria for a pre-existing project:
* low barrier of entry, easy to set up dev environment
* has low hanging fruit, preferably an active issue tracker
* we should be able to add new features and fix broken stuff

Other considerations:
* is the size of the project manageable?
* can we use it when we're done?
* is it fun?

Please scour you hearts and minds for potential projects, and suggest
them here. We aren't looking for a huge commitment, and we may end up
trying a few different projects before we find one that gels, but that
is part of the process.

Suggest!

Thanks!
-CLR

[Justin Henry]

writing tests
adding features
documentation
spaghetti

fixing really broken stuff
making something run faster

[Dmitri Zagidulin]

Incidentally, that's a great job summarizing a long and meandering
conversation! very concise.

[CodeOfficer]

*chiming in late as usual*

The first thing that comes to mind is would I be excited to use it?
Try as I might I can't make myself work on something I wouldn't use. I
mean I could for the sake of the group, but I wouldn't on my own
initiative. That may be obvious I guess.

Another aspect to consider is refactoring. It would be interesting to
take something functional and recreate it from the ground up with an
better interface. testing along the way of course. There are quite of
few useful things pout there that are a pain to use.

meh

[CodeOfficer]

Kinda like how Prawn came around to replace PDFwriter

[Whitelancer]

I know I'm sort of out of the loop as I'm not in Portland, but if I
were to contribute (and yes, I'd love to do so!) I think what I'd
enjoy most is sort of what CO said -- taking something and refactoring
it from scratch (or from a more basic, solid foundation) into
something very well tested, documented, and organized, and then from
there adding new features and the like.

It constantly amazes me how poor code is for some modules/gems we use
all the time! Or if not poorly coded, at least just not optimized or
easy to use. I'd love to partake in enhancing something that exists,
we know the functionality is needed, etc.

What, exactly, I'm not sure of. My interests really lie with
scheduling and event apps, so probably something to deal with dates
and schedules and the like. Those are always so messy.

I'd definitely like to learn more about CouchDB, but sadly I couldn't
contribute much at this point. Maybe some documentation/commenting or
something until I got better acquainted.

[CLR]

Our summary of potential projects so far:

1) TwitterAuth:
Standard authentication stack [gem] for Rails using Twitter to log in.
http://github.com/mbleigh/twitter-auth/issues

2) Haml:
HTML Abstraction Markup Language [gem] - A Markup Haiku edithttp://github.com/nex3/haml/issues

3) RdocInfo:
Ruby Library Documentation Service edi
http://github.com/zapnap/rdocinfo/issues

4) Marvin:
EventMachine + IRC Client / Server + (Optional) DRb + Ruby (all one big work in progress) edit
http://github.com/Sutto/marvin/tree/master [no issues listed yet]

I'll give everyone a few more days to make some suggestions.  Remember that we aren't investing a long-term commitment into this project, maximum of one week, so maybe a few hours here and there per participant.  If we get just a patch or two accepted, I think that's enough to warrant opening the bottle of mead that we have planned.

Thanks!
-CLR

[Justin Henry]

On Aug 23, 2009, at 2:57 PM, CLR wrote:

> Our summary of potential projects so far:
>

I'm not sure how well this works, or if I've set it up correctly, but
I've put these into a google moderator series:

http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=b46dd&t=b2797

Enjoy!

-Justin

[CLR]

You can add a project, or express your interest in a suggested project
at the moderator page:
http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=b46dd&t=b2797

We'll leave that up for two more days, and then pick one. How do people
feel about meeting this Tuesday at Frontier Coffee Shop/Cafe in
Brunswick for a ninja kickoff?

Thanks!
-CLR

On Aug 23, 2009, at 2:57 PM, CLR wrote:

> Our summary of potential projects so far:
>

I'm not sure how well this works, or if I've set it up correctly, but
I've put these into a google moderator series:

http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=b46dd&t=b2797

Enjoy!

-Justin

[CLR]

OK, hold off on plans for Tuesday, as that seems to booked for a lot of
people. Let's pick a day after people get back to Portland, as it seems
everyone is out of town this weekend.

Thanks!
-CLR

[Renae Bair]

Sounds good. Not sure I could get a babysitter for that afternoon. But even if I miss something during the daytime hours, maybe I can hook up with someone in the evening afterward. 

Renae

[Whitelancer]

That's too bad, Tuesday would have been fun. Just let me know what
the plan looks like and I'll try to make it!

[Dmitri Zagidulin]

Added the CREM (http://www.penguicon.net/projects/crem ) conference
scheduling project for voting.

I'd be happy to get together and code Tues or any other time next week.