[Devel] OpenHatch 0.11.03 is out

[Asheesh Laroia]

Whew, everybody.

A few days late, OpenHatch 0.11.03 is out. I've pushed a tag to git.

I want to take a few minutes here to thank all the people who helped us go 
forward, from long-time contributors like Karen, Jack, and Jessica, to the 
new folks who recently showed up in the git log: Paul Bakulich (AKA 
palhmbs on IRC) and Jairo and Joel, whom I met at PyCon.

There are some important changes in this release's git log:

* Jack has converted many of the bug trackers to be asynchronous, laying 
the groundwork, and helped us move forward from some sucky code I wrote a 
year ago (the "Epoch" class -- may it rest in peace).

* Karen did a major refresh of the front page, which helped people see how 
the site can help *them*.

* Jairo added monitoring of the bug import and nightly emailing script, 
and together we (I think) nailed down a bunch of problems that were 
causing bug import to get stuck.

* Joel found and fixed a bug that was causing some users to not succeed at 
logging in. This required chasing down buggy dependencies and making a 
package, and getting into our own dependency installation system.

* Paul, after a long time in IRC, showed up in the git log for the first 
time, fixing broken links, adjusting documentation, and adding the 
super-neat django-debug-toolbar.

We have a lot to be proud of!

It does seem like a smaller release than in past months. I think some of 
that can be traced back to management: I'm not happy with my own 
performance this past month and a half. In particular, I think that I 
didn't do a good job as project maintainer in setting highly concrete 
goals for the release.

For our early releases, there were a lot of bugs to fix in the site, and 
it was easy to figure out what direction was "forward". As we get past 
that now, I think that we need more vision for what the site will become, 
and how we will get there. If we can share this vision in a clear fashion, 
we will be able to figure out how to help newcomers and old-timers make a 
difference in the project.

Additionally, in a more mundane note, I wasn't very timely this month with 
patch review. I'll need help; Jack, for example, even though you're 
retiring from coding soon, maybe you'd be willing to do more patch review? 
I think we should also reconfigure the bug tracker so that it's easier for 
people to stay in top of project updates; I've filed some bugs to request 
changes along those lines:

* https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue378
* https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue379

I'm learning a lot about project management from all this!

I'm proud of all the work we've put into OpenHatch, and I'm truly grateful 
to be working with all of you.

For the next few days, my priority with OpenHatch is to come up with a 
proposal for granting shell (and deployment) access to more people. even 
though you're retiring from coding (soon), maybe you would be willing to 
do patch review, too. Once that's done, I'm going to think through what 
goals make sense for a short April release, as well as what big changes we 
can set our sights on for May. I encourage you all to think big, too!

-- 
-- Asheesh.

http://asheesh.org/

People are beginning to notice you.  Try dressing before you leave the house.