BlogHer Conference + Getting involved in Drupal

I'm actually terrified to go because I've never been to a blogging conference, and especially not a women blogging conference, and especially not a women blogging conference where I am supposed to speak. ;) I would love to see some friendly faces there. :D

So let's do it now! :)

Summer of Code

how old do you have to be to do summer of code? is it too late? can there be 'winter holiday break' of code - or maybe some free groups that you can sign up for for a shorter period of time and try doing some software development in a group? do you have to be a computer science major and show summer of code people all of your amazing credentials and long history in the software development industry? because i would really like to be able to sign up and write functions with people. i code alone at home.

You have to be at least 18 and enrolled in a post-secondary institution of some kind to participate in SoC. Beyond that, there's no requirement for anything else like a formal computer science degree; in fact, one of our SoC students this year is getting his master's in Psychology, and I came from a community college. :) You're competing based on the strength of your application, how well your project idea fits in with the Drupal community, the initiative you show during the application process, etc.

Unfortunately, the SoC application deadline already passed for this year, so it's too late to participate for 2008. "If they should run the program again" (standard disclaimer), the time when they announce the program is usually Marchish. This year it happened right over Drupalcon, so I think a lot of people missed the news. :(

And no, there is no "winter holiday break" of code, although if there is another GHOP (which is a program for 13-18 year olds to do more bite-sized tasks for open source projects), that might take place over winter holidays again.

SoC is not great for getting out of the "coding alone at home" thing though; students are required to work on their own projects and can't collaborate in a team, although of course there's a mentor assigned and often interested community members will report bugs and such on your project so it makes you feel less alone.

Code

are there places on drupal.org that ask for help? how do you pick a project to help with? how smart (meaning, how good of a coder) do you have to be to be of any use? how do you know if you are any good as a coder, if you've been teaching yourself?

One place to look might be DROP, which is like GHOP but open to everyone to participate. There is a list of open tasks which identify "low-hanging fruit" for new contributors to pick from, and a "mentor" assigned to most tasks. You work in the issue queues and other tools the community uses directly, so it's great for schooling you on how community development works.

I want to make one thing abundantly clear: You Do Not Need To Be A "Good" Coder (whatever that means) to get involved in open source. Before I got accepted to SoC, I had this idea in my head that everyone who works on open source is some sort of expert-level programmer and that since I taught myself PHP by playing around with it I would never "measure up" to them, and so I should was forever doomed to stay on the sidelines and look on as this cool stuff happened. In fact, if it wasn't for SoC lowering the expectation level ("Well, it's for students, so it will probably be okay if I don't know everything...") I probably would still be looking on the sidelines.

Once you get on "this" side of the contributor fence, you right away notice a few things:

1. You probably know a lot more than you give yourself credit for. Particularly if you're a woman, since we tend to demean our skills, on the whole.
2. There is some horrible code out there. Absolutely awful. Security hole ridden, destroy your database kind of bad. But you know what? It's okay! Because open source isn't about who can rattle off all of the arguments for every function in PHP. It's simply about a whole bunch of people coming together, each contributing what they know, in order to make something that works. The community turns awful code into awesome code. :)
3. You will pretty quickly pick up on a bunch of "best practice" kind of things that you never thought of before by digging around in the guts of an open source project and working to refine your code with the community. It's an awesome learning tool.

Bugs

walk though a typical example of a bug fix droplet thing...what is an example of a little bug? do you sign up and 'check out' the bug, or is someone else going to just zoom in and fix it and take away your steam in the puzzle solving process. if you try to help with a bug can you ask questions...(meaning, how grumpy are drupal people? will you get an answer? a snippy answer?)

Some examples of "little" bugs might be typos, parse errors, notices, things like that. Unfortunately it's hard to tell on the surface what the "depth" of a bug is when all you're going by are issue titles. That's another reason we started DROP; so that the people who understand the scope of a bug can designate "Ok, this one's an easy one."

Bug fixing all happens via the issue queue, which is basically where the Drupal community "gets stuff done." While mailing lists and IRC are great for discussing a problem, and working groups will help organize people, when it comes time to actually taking action, there's no substitute for an issue queue. Addi did a great little video on how to maneuver around the issue queue at http://www.lullabot.com/videocast/introduction-drupalorg-issue-queue.

There's an "Assigned" field that you can use to "claim" a bug. When you assign an issue to yourself, you're basically saying to everyone else "I got this one; don't worry." You can always unassign yourself later if you so choose. Because a lot of newbies misuse that field though, it doesn't hurt to literally post, "I'm going to try working on this" so people know it was intentional.

There are a couple token crumudgeons in the Drupal community, like any other large, diverse group of people. But on the whole I can say with absolute confidence that if you are part of that 1% of people actually helping out with an open source project, people will bend over backwards to help you. The smart ones, anyway. ;) If you're fixing a bug, esp. with core, and you run into a problem, ask in #drupal. http://drupal.org/bug-bingo is a lot of fun if you're looking for something to fix, btw. :)

Documentation

how is documentation writing not the same as cleaning up after people and making people feel comfortable in drupal-land? (i know it isn't, but it might be worthwhile to spell that out)

Well there are a few different ways to go about helping with documentation:
* Cleaning up after people and making people feel comfortable in Drupal land :) IOW, becoming a "caretaker" of the handbook.
* Engineering new pages/sections of the handbook. IOW, becoming a "co-author" of the handbook.
* Quality assurance on our code documentation; do all functions have PHPDoc? Is it consistent?
* Also, something as simple as reading a gigantic forum post or issue and writing up a summary someplace can be HUGELY valuable and is something anyone can do. (Well, anyone with enough time, that is. ;))

Motivations

why do people join drupal development projects? where are they in their career of coding? what are they hoping to achieve?

People have all sort of reasons for contribtuing to open source:
* Moral/Ethical. They believe that software should be free, and that Drupal is a great platform which supports this ideal, and want to put their energy into improving it.
* Vanity. Let's face it; it's pretty cool when you can put code out there that thousands of people will use.
* Money. They contribute because it positions them as an expert in the community, which leads to more (and bigger) clients.
* Social. It's FUN to participate and meet friends, work together on challenging problems, etc.
* Practical. I need something fixed. I'll do it in the open source community because that way I won't be responsible for maintaining it myself.
* Skills improvement. Nothing like learning from people who are experts in their fields, and being able to work with them directly.
* Others I'm sure I'm not thinking of. :P

IRC

what is an example of a question that you might ask on IRC, and how do you know that it won't be a dumb annoying question?

First rule of IRC is Read The Topic. Failing to do that will get you off on the wrong foot with the people in the room and tends to adversely impact your ability to get help.

In IRC, in order to hold a conversation, you have to read every single line. So people appreciate courtesies like getting down to business and asking you question, using pastebin for large chunks of code rather than spamming them in-channel, and keeping conversation on-topic.

In terms of asking questions, try to phrase questions that could be answered in 1-2 minutes, rather than 1-2 hours; most people on IRC are there for short bursts of time in between other things. "How do I build a product review website?" will probably get you nothing but crickets in return, because that's going to involve at least a half-hour commitment, and probably lots of follow-up after. By contrast, "I just downloaded a copy of Drupal HEAD and can't get it to install. I'm getting the error: [error message]. I searched the issue queue, and found something that looks related at [link] but that issue was fixed a long time ago. Anyone else having the same problem?" will probably get 4-5 people looking at your issue, a patch in the queue within minutes, and a pat on the back for spotting a core bug. ;)

So basically, try and research out as much as you can before you ask your question. It's respectful of other peoples' time, and often you'll find that in the process of doing enough research so you feel comfortable asking a question in IRC, you find your answer. ;)

Conferences

how do you find good conferences to go to to meet mroe cool programmin' chicks like yourself? (especially if you are like me and have to see a face in person before communicating online)

I.... really have no idea. :( The only conferences I go to are the ones where people ask me to speak at. And I have no idea how they find me. :D I'll go start another post and see if someone else can answer that for you. :)

This is kind of delayed but I think you found it in terms of Drupal-centric developers. You could post here and in the Jobs group, though I think there's a limit of 2 or 3 groups to not be considered spamming. You also might go to a local Drupal meetup (there's a nice one in LA) to find potential contractors.