The Boston Initiative: Game plan for Nov. 1 meetup

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bryanhirsch's picture

November 1st will be the second of five meetups where we dedicate one hour, from 6:30 to 7:30, to learning about and contributing to Drupal core. (Until we have a better name for this contribute-to-core-and-work-your-way-up-the-ladder project, I’m just going to refer to this as, “The Boston Initiative”.)

In October we proved it’s possible to get a large number of people--newbies, veterans, non-coders and coders--who have never worked the Drupal’s core issue queue up and running, making meaningful contributions in one hour. A number of people expressed interest in trying smaller breakout groups in November. This way, people on different steps in the Drupal ladder can focus on learning about or working on things that are more interesting to them.

Group leaders are key to making breakouts work. So, I’m recruiting breakout group leaders for November’s meeting. For example, if we have four people who are interested to learn how to test patches, it would be best to pair these people up with someone who has tested patches before. If you’re willing and able to lead a breakout group doing any of the activities listed below or working the issue queue for any particular Drupal 7 core component or Drupal 8 initiative, please contact me.

Possible activities for breakout groups could include:
Write tests
Re-roll patches
Write patches
Documentation: API docs
Documentation: help docs
Test patches
Find and report bugs
Draft issue summaries for long threads
Reproduce and document reported bugs
Install Git
Install Drupal locally
(other?)

See you in two weeks.

Bryan

Comments

DrupalCon Tribute

jeckman's picture

Interesting thread over in the Drupal Dojo group about a new kind of one-day camp/con focused on increasing community contributions on the same kind of ladder we've been discussing:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/185399

I pointed kbell at this thread as well

Name issue

kbell's picture

I just wanted to point out that the name is DrupalConTribute (all one word, or if separated the break is after the Drupal (Drupal Contribute)) - no confusion with DrupalCon, since that name is trademarked and owned by Dries and/or the Drupal Association. Not trying to step on toes here at all - the emphasis is DEFINTELY on the CONTRIBUTE part not the CON part.

Cheers,

--Kelly Bell
Gotham City Drupal
twitter: @kbell | @gothamdrupal
http://drupal.org/user/293443

Hi guys!!!

kbell's picture

Yes, it certainly looks like we're on the same page, in many ways! Angie webchick was gracious enough to spend some time with me at DIWD a couple weeks ago here in NY and we hammered out an outline of the curriculum. The goal is and always has been that the Campers each come out of the session with a successful patch commit. Angie pointed out to me that if we do it as I originally planned it (with actual "live" modules on d.o.), the curriculum wouldn't be fully portable. I agree with her that there must be at least a "simulator" version of the Camp - and then maybe we can, where possible, provide the structure needed to run the camp against a live module (a la code sprint) as well. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, of course. We do intend to host the "fake code sprint" code on d.o. as well, to simulate as closely as possible the conditions a developer would encounter in the course of doing an actual code sprint or working independently on a contrib module as a community contributor.

We're going to spend a lot of time on Git, local dev best practices and testing (drreport, simpletest), and we'll be working "against" Pantheon's environment setup (which follows best practices - see the Mercury Project for details if you're unfamiliar), based on a fork of QuickStart. Angie's experience, and mine, is that this curriculum cannot be successfully done as a hands-on in any kind of regular session length (1-2 hours can only provide for a lecture format, hence the big gap in adoption for attendees), hence the one-day format. A second day or advanced version of the Camp might be where we can do an actual code sprint against live code, and/or cover advanced Git techniques, etc.

Rather than do any of this as a breakout of a typical Con or Camp, we're doing these as independent initiatives, with attention paid to the education idea of a "cohort", or group of learners that stick together, network, lean on each other for support as they proceed from the camp environment. That's why the groups are small, as well.

Angie had proferred the idea of us doing a Boston version (perhaps hosted at Acquia) sometime in Q1 2012, before Denver, as a final run-through/test event. I'm planning to run this camp on the (Friday) "code sprint day" in Denver, as well. We're also going to do a tiny "proof-of-concept" version here in NYC, probably at my house, with only 5-6 people present in order to polish the curriculum before the initial public event.

I will be posting the precis of the curriculum Angie and I drew up this week, and will cross-post here. I'm very excited that you reached out, and look forward to working together, if you guys are still interested!

VERY abbreviated day plan:
0. Intro (d.o username, QuickStart distributed on thumb drives distributed if not already installed - pre-install link/instructions will be provided)
1. Tools (git - vers.ctrl, xdebug, xhprof, dreditor, drush, etc.) QuickStart
BREAK
2. Git, Sandbox
3. Issue Queue process and etiquette
LUNCH
4. Coding standards (devel, coder, security standards, etc.)
5. Testing / find the bug (modules are set up with known issues to be discovered, covers frequently-encountered types of bugs, sql injection, standards violations, theme, etc)
6. dreditor and queue etiquette (again)
BREAK
7. review process (partners review each other's work)
8. rolling patches

9. commit process

AFTER PARTY

In each section, we will do the thing we're talking about as we encounter it. The idea is that we're doing a "walk" of the contribution process, where as we traverse the topic tree we enact the principles, so the learners can't forget the details of what we're talking about and the info is reinforced by doing, at each step. Learners will work with partners in select sections of process. Make sense?

Cheers,

--Kelly Bell
Gotham City Drupal
twitter: @kbell | @gothamdrupal
http://drupal.org/user/293443

What room?

nanharbison's picture

Are we still in Tang Center E51-145?

Boston

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