Isabel, I really like the idea of tagging tasks as "trivial" for new developers to pick up and start working. That'll surely provide directions for us.
Thought of sharing my experiences here.. Being a beginner in Mahout as I was wanting to pick up some tasks to work on, I had a tough time navigating through JIRA and identifying the list of open tasks and the priority of them. To handle this problem, I created a JIRA dashboard for Mahout which would give me the Open tasks with their type / priority etc. This helped me quickly get an idea of where I could contribute. Also I customized it to have a list of tasks that are tagged for the current release. So this could probably give the veterans and PMC members an idea on where we are wrt the current release. When I tried to make this dashboard "sharable", I realized that I didn't have access :( I'll be more than happy to create a component in the JIRA dashboard for new comers. This could be a landing spot for new developers ? The problem is that I don't have permissions to share the dashboard. If someone with access to share a dashboard can create one for Mahout and share it, that'll be a great help. we could reference this in wiki and thereby direct new people to "trivial" tasks. I am attaching a screenshot of the dashboard for reference. Would something like this be useful ? [image: Mahout Jira dashboard.png] Also we'd need to make the wiki more informative for users / developers. For eg, we'd need more information on the data structures we use and users can access / visualize the output. After reading chapter 8 of MiA, I got an idea about the vector data structure we use. Since this chapter is available for free in pdf format, could we add its content into our wiki ? regards Joe. On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 10:02 PM, Raphael Cendrillon < [email protected]> wrote: > Hi Isabel, > > As someone keen to contribute, but still quite new to Mahout, I think this > is a great idea. > > On Oct 24, 2011, at 6:39 PM, Isabel Drost <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On 24.10.2011 Grant Ingersoll wrote: > >> Docs is one obvious one. Also, just keep supplying patches. > > > > Speaking of supplying patches: Doing so seems non-trivial for quite some > > developers. > > > > During the Apache Hadoop Hackathon Berlin earlier this year Jakob Homan > did a > > very interesting exercise: The Hadoop project seems to have bug reports > that are > > trivial to fix (trivial as in typos in documentation, enhanced error > messages > > etc.). Jakob used those to introduce developers to the whole patch > generation > > and submission process during the Hackathon. > > > > Dan (and users of Mahout, in particular those who have not yet submitted > any > > patch) - do you think that having some of those bugs around (w/o a > version > > number assigned, maybe tagged as "trivial") help you get started with > being > > active contributors? How about marking issues the community feels > manageable for > > newcomers as "mentor" as proposed in the Getting Started guide of > community.a.o > > project: http://community.apache.org/gettingStarted/101.html ? > > > > > > Isabel > > >
