Uri Guttman wrote: > hackathon. we have tried to own a module but that didn't get moving so > well. so how about a hackathon on one of the most popular modules on > cpan?
I like the idea of exploring what we could around hackathons. But I'm not entirely convinced that they're a good fit as a tech meeting. For many, doing productive coding away from their normal work space is difficult. Not everyone is equipped with a laptop suitable for development work. With that in mind, this might work better as a group Hangout activity, in a virtual meeting space. (It may make sense to still have meeting space at MIT for those who want to work together in the same room.) The other advantage to a virtual meeting space is that it might be easier to accommodate a longer session - like 3 hours - and offer greater scheduling flexibility. Participating in a hackathon is not just about lending your expertise, but also about learning. One of the ways we could facilitate this is by pairing up experienced and novice developers. I've had good luck doing pair coding sessions using a shared 'screen' terminal session and some audio channel (Hangout, VoIP, etc.) for communications. (We'd need some cloud servers to work on. A free developer instance at AWS?) I suggest approaching this in a crowdfunding sort of way, where the organizer decides a minimum number of participants necessary to make the hackathon worth while (maybe 6 people?), and only if you exceed that threshold does it happen. (Another reason to keep it separate from tech meetings. You want tech meetings to be regular and predictable.) People get inspired by the project being hacked on, so it might take several rounds of proposing a project and seeing if we can get enough people to pledge to participate. Before more effort is put into pursing this, its be good to find out if there are even enough people here that would have an appetite for this sort of thing. If you're reading this and you'd like to lend your Perl expertise or learn from others while doing some hands-on coding on open source Perl projects, speak up. Also, mention if there are specific modules or topic areas that interest you. (Getting a CPAN author credit can be good for your resume and LinkedIn profile.) So far we have myself, Uri, and I'm guessing Bill. Who else? I suspect we probably need something like 10 to 20 people that at least have some interest in order to get a minimum of 6 people to pledge to participate in a specific hackathon. There's no shortage of modules on CPAN that could use some work. Take for inspiration Neil Bowers "100 days of CPAN releases": http://neilb.org/2014/06/27/100-days-of-releases.html In those 100 days, I've done 126 releases of 52 different dists. 28 of the 52 were existing CPAN dists that I've either adopted or got co-maint on, and in all cases fixed at least some (usually all) of the outstanding bugs. Almost all of the 28 were selected because they're dists used by at least one other dist on CPAN. [...] Working on modules written by a wide range of authors opens your eyes, and challenges some of the ruts you may be stuck in. My coding style has definitely evolved in various small ways over the last 3+ months. There are lots of dists on CPAN that have easy-to-fix bugs outstanding. I've found that emailing authors "hey, can I fix (some of) your bugs and make your dist CPANTS-clean?" is an effective way to kick-start contributing to CPAN. Why not have a look at the adoption list and give it a go? Dave Cross's perl-api-squad project (http://perlhacks.com/2014/01/perl-apis/) also provides fertile ground for hacking. The idea is that developers would be more likely to continue to use Perl for new projects if they saw modules and example code implementing the APIs for the newest web services. -Tom -- Tom Metro The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA "Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting." http://www.theperlshop.com/ _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
