Hey fellow developers: I'm not sure if you've seen http://eg2013.sitka.bclibraries.ca/schedule/#wed to look at the Dev Hackfest track, but there are some interesting changes compared to how things ran in previous years. We don't have to stick strictly to the schedule, but I think it's a suggestion based on the experiences of previous years where we get a lot of people interested in contributing to Evergreen who don't have a lot of experience with it yet. In the past, people like Bill Erickson have whipped up impromptu intros on the spot. So perhaps we can take some time up front to provide "intro to..." sessions to help out relative newcomers to the code, then lead into an afternoon of glorious hackfest creativity.
First of all, there's an "Install fest" pencilled in for the first 15 minutes of the day. I don't think that literally means "get Evergreen installed in 15 minutes" for people who haven't tried or succeeded before, but perhaps that would be a good slot for Jason Stephenson's "Building dev images on Ubuntu" topic that he added to the hackfest ideas page at http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=dev:hackfest:eg2013 I've volunteered to offer an "Intro to TPAC hacking" session that will hopefully get a lot of people productive on skinning the TPAC. There's room for a "Testing & sign-off process overview" that would fill a bit of a gap in our "contributing" documentation; that could probably merge naturally into a "how we use git" discussion as well. Is anyone interested in leading sessions on these topics, or have ideas about other "Intro to Evergreen development" topics that they would like to offer up at the Hackfest? There's still plenty of room for the creative / crazy hackfest session in the afternoon; in fact, we should probably encourage the community to submit fun challenges (emailing to the list or just adding to the wiki page at http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=dev:hackfest:eg2013). I've edited the wiki page to reflect the morning / afternoon sessions but haven't moved any items out of the initial table yet. As an example of something concrete that came out of last year's hackfest, Lebbeous and I collaborated on adding TPAC debug timing so that we could investigate where performance bottlenecks were occurring during page rendering; it's even come in handy once or twice! Please feel free to move your existig items around or to add new intro topics or hack challenges, even if you might not be committed to contributing to them yourself. Sometimes an idea will inspire someone else to jump in. I'm also hoping that we'll get charismatic volunteers for one or two lightning talks to sum up the highlights of the hackfest. Because hey, what's the point of pounding away over an editor for hours if nobody recognizes your hard work?
