[OPEN-ILS-DEV] EG2013 - organizing the developer hackfest (more!)

[Dan Scott]

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?