[OH-Dev] Amazing PyCon sprints

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi all,

The PyCon sprints have been amazing. I'm typing here toward the end of 
them, and I just wanted to write a brief report of how great things have 
been.

Here's how things looked on Monday: 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulproteus/6839832732/in/photostream/ 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulproteus/6839835602/in/photostream/

And, for those who like words:

* Portia, a new contributor, submitted a patch to improve the quality of 
the git training mission.

* Jacquie, whose first commit landed in Janaury 2012, stayed to sprint on 
improving the quality of the training missions, moving them toward 
class-based views. This also meant learning a lot about git branches and 
Github.

* Berry Phillips started (and probably completed, pending review) the long 
slog of extracting the OpenHatch bug download+parse code into a separate 
Python package. Having seen the deep inside of OpenHatch, he will probably 
spend a bunch of his future time on the frontend. (-:

* John Morrison wrote new code that integrates with the Github API to 
download issue data from there. This, once merged, will make it possible 
for users of Github Issues to automatically add their bitesize bugs to 
OpenHatch's volunteer opportunity finder.

* Karen Rustad fixed crucial design issues with the redesign that I missed 
when I deployed the redesign, and also created (and got feedback on) a 
mockup for how openhatch.org/search/ can meaningfully show projects, not 
just individual bugs, for new contributors.

* Russia submitted her first patch, moving patch.py from 
mysite/missions/base/ into the vendor/ directory. She also experimented 
with Github pull requests, and is interested in solving another ticket.

* Walker Hale IV identified two fundamental issues with the data 
import/export system, and submitted patches+email conversations that 
addressed most of them. Jenkins' builder for the search app is still 
failing; further patches to finish the issues are forthcoming. He also 
repeatedly answered the question for other PyCon attendees, "What is 
OpenHatch?"

* Daniel Mizyrycki got to know our documentation and auto-builders. He was 
particularly enthused by Karen's talk on documentation, and how it can be 
built in a way that does not repeat oneself. We now have Sphinx 
documentation directly due to him.

* Pam Selle submitted fixes for various important layout problems, some 
which were as bad as CSS syntax errors and missing close-tags on our HTML.

* Asheesh managed to not just mentor new contributors but also write some 
code that is a sketch of how we can improve the bug downloading code, via 
removing a lot of our bookkeeping on top of Twisted, and showing that to 
John, who might be able to run with it.

Pam and Walker led the battle cry to ask me to accept patches as Github 
pull requests, which I succumbed to.

We all made a video of the sprint, and a photo was snapped also. I don't 
know where the video is, but the photo is linked-to at the top of this 
email post!

In terms of users of the site, and interest in the project,

* glyph (of Twisted) asked if we had implemented a workflow for handing 
new contributors to his project. I was happy to say yes, thanks to Jule 
Slootbeek's work on the backend a few months ago.

* One new user went through the training missions and learned a lot about 
command-line tools on his Ubuntu machine in the process.

This was astounding. We had nine people (plus me, makes 10) here at the 
Sprints who have made meaningful contributions to the code. And their 
(y'all's!) enthusiasm for the project is what will push it to new 
directions.

I think that a few things made this such as success:

* I prepared (during the start of the sprint, as well as I could) to list 
some good issues for newcomers.

* I asked people at the beginning of the sprint what their backgrounds 
are, and aimed to come up with tasks targeted at them.

* Pam showed up in the middle, adding one to our contributor count, and 
also encouraged us to have a group dinner. (-:

* People's willingness to ask questions. This could have been even better 
-- I suppose even more maintainers in attendance would have been great. 
New contributors did chat a lot with each other, so I wasn't always a 
bottleneck, which is great.

* Dramatically more reliable setup instructions for getting a development 
environment going, compared to one year ago.

So -- thanks to all who sprinted, and to all over the years who've worked 
to give us such a great project to sprint on!

-- Asheesh.