Onboarding Developers

[Toby O at UWS]

It was great meeting so many of you this week.

 

As I mentioned to some, we think it would be a really good idea to have a discussion around onboarding developers. It's never easy to get started with a new piece of software, and ultimately a lot relies on the tenacity of the new developer - but at the same time, it might be time to discuss ways to ease the pain in that regard. I heard a lot about future plans for ReDBox, and a growing user base, and it leads me to believe that demand is going to go up before it goes down.

 

I hope I'm not out of place if I help organise the meeting?

 

Topics:

- Who has, or can make, the time to develop some onboarding/training/checklist for a new developer

- Who would benefit from the training/checklist?

- What should it look/feel/smell like?

 

I imagine it goes without saying that the meeting would be online.

 

Doodle poll is here - for mid March timeframe: http://doodle.com/epq9hkn75hv5yp24

A few have complained about Doodle, but it's the only way I know of that allows such a large community to try to coordinate. BTW I will be favouring certain people's time schedule when landing on a day/time, if that's wrong I don't wanna be right.

 

I'm not entirely sure who is on this list so I might cross post into the redbox-repo group as well.

 

[Peter Sefton]

Thanks Toby for kicking this off.

Alongside this, I have been wondering how we can start to flesh-out the documentation for ReDBOX and The Fascinator. I have one particular example in mind, having watched our new developer Lloyd grapple with making some changes to the default build of The Fascinator in the area of authorisation to view and edit resources. In this case I think what's needed is a wiki page that sets out the real basics in a clear way.

How do I control who can see an item (and its parts)? This involves roles and the security_filter - so what are they and how do they work (in Solr and at the filestore level)? Where do I need to change config and/or code. (Yes there is some info on this, but it assumes a level of understanding I don't think we have here at UWS).

So, in addition to the discussion about 'onboarding' I propose to work with Lloyd early next week on setting out what he's learned about this over the last few weeks and throw it open to those more expert to fill in the gaps and correct us.

pt