Thanks for this suggestion, Tom. I am interested in participating in a distributed hackathon.
I would probably learn more than I contribute. I am comfortable in Perl 5.8.3, but ignorant of higher versions. peace, -- Kripa On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 7:01 PM, Tom Metro <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
