[OH-Dev] Search Expansion

[Alex Chumbley]

>
> I'm super excited by this idea, Alex, and would love to support you in
> doing this.
>
> I have a few ideas I've been mulling over, but haven't had time to
> implement, so part of me wants to say: I suggest you implement whatever you
> think is better, and we can merge it if it's no worse.
>
> (Also, whoa -- what open source dev class? That sounds super.)
>

Sweet! So, it seems like a pretty big undertaking to totally redesign how
search is done. I agree with all the points in the issues you linked.
However, it would be a more manageable task to just use the Github API to
load in any project data from the search results (on the client with JS),
and populate the results with it.

Now, it's more of a cosmetic change (people wouldn't be able to search by
"Large Projects/Small Projects" etc. If a redesign of search is in the
works, though, maybe it's not a good idea to just do a small cosmetic
change. Maybe it would be smarter to just bite the bullet and start
re-designing stuff. I'm not as familiar with the " crazy hack of MySQL
REGEX queries" that are done to do search currently, so I'd be a little
less helpful until I got caught up. But, even as a cosmetic change, one can
imagine the benefits that could be gleaned from having more info about the
project itself in the bugs that appear in the search results.

I don't think something like this is going to be a DB task since all of
this data changes potentially daily, but I'm totally open to ideas on how
to proceed. I'm going to start hacking around with the Github API and see
what I can do with the client. This would be easiest and result in the
least impact on the current system in terms of bits of code touched. Let me
know if anyone has any thoughts!

On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 11:46 AM, Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at sandstorm.io>
wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 11:35 AM, Alex Chumbley <Chumbley at mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> So, I've been using Openhatch as a case study in both my UI/UX class and
>> OpenSource dev class for the past couple weeks. It's been fun, I've been
>> contributing in very trivial ways (github @chums923).
>>
>> Anyway, I've been looking for a way to contribute something a little more
>> meaningful (one of the goals of this OpenSource class). I know that this
>> topic has been discussed before, but one that came to mind immediately was
>> how search is done. Currently, it's just done via bug trackers for
>> projects, but one could imagine we could offer a user a lot more to search.
>> We could allow people to search for:
>>
>> 1) Well maintained projects
>>
>> 2) Projects with large/small amount of contributors
>>
>> 3) Old/New projects
>>
>> just to name a few. As it stands, people don't even know what a project
>> is about without a few extra navigation steps. All of this data currently
>> exists on a per bug basis, but not for the project. And it would all be
>> pretty easy to get via the Github API.
>>
>
> I'm super excited by this idea, Alex, and would love to support you in
> doing this.
>
> I have a few ideas I've been mulling over, but haven't had time to
> implement, so part of me wants to say: I suggest you implement whatever you
> think is better, and we can merge it if it's no worse.
>
> (Also, whoa -- what open source dev class? That sounds super.)
>
> You can find some of my (and others'!) ideas, for whatever they're worth,
> here:
>
> https://github.com/openhatch/oh-mainline/issues/1242
>
> https://github.com/openhatch/oh-mainline/issues/1029
>
>
>>
>> *tl;dr* I'd like to contribute something meaningful. Expanding search
>> came to mind (increases UX IMHO). If this doesn't jive with everyone, I'll
>> get back to the drawing board and come back with another proposal! (There's
>> an idea floating around in my head of having a mission that deals with
>> testing)
>>
> +1
>
> There's lots that can be done; to me, identifying the parts of the project
> that are exciting but yet under-deliver are the most impactful things to
> do. I'm grateful and touched that you are interested in doing that!
>
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