karzilla | Dreamwidth Development AMA for July

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Dreamwidth Development AMA for July

One of the things I want to start doing as DevCom on a semi-regular basis is encouraging people to come to me with any questions they have about Dreamwidth development, large or small. I want to do this in two ways: for people who prefer real time chat, I will start holding IRC office hours, and for people who prefer threaded comment discussions, use this post as a springboard!

You can ask me absolutely anything related to Dreamwidth and I will answer to the best of my ability. Don't be shy!

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What's going on in dw-dev-land? That hasn't been covered by just reading the code tours, that is?

This. As sub-questions, what are the ongoing big projects at the moment?

Is tt being abandoned? (ie is foundation as well as or instead of). If so, why?

As I told

allen I am going to work on a proper State of the Dev type post over the next week or so, but in the meantime, let me address your TT vs. Foundation question.

TT is not being abandoned; it is the templating language that is replacing BML across the site. Foundation is a newer initiative that provides more dynamic styling (think CSS with variables) to allow us to make the site more responsive and mobile-friendly.

All of the pages that use Foundation have been converted to TT. Not all of the pages that have been converted to TT use Foundation, but we aim to fix that in the near term.

I hope that answers your question! Let me know if I need to clarify anything.

Thanks :-)

Thanks for asking this! It's something I want to work on communicating regularly in dw_dev, since the code tours tend to happen in large batches and well after the fact.

A proper answer will take more time than I have right now, but I promise it's at the top of my priority list. In the meantime, let me respond with another question - what format would you like the answer to take? Are you more interested in ongoing projects, or what individual developers are doing?

Also: what have YOU been doing lately? Mostly iOS development, I take it?

No, no, no--I'm supposed to be asking the questions! You're supposed to be giving answers! :D

Ok, fine. Let's see... Well, to start with, format-wise, I think that the format of the answer would depend on the content of the answer. If there has been work on big features that aren't ready yet, highlight those. If there has been lots of theme work done, mention those. BML-to-TT conversion? Gather it together and say how these four people have moved seven more pages off BML. No coherent theme but just a bunch of random bugs/improvements? Say that.

Future work is a good topic, too. Did some good issues just get posted from DW-suggestions? Those could be highlighted. Is a particular bug causing lots of people problems? Ask someone to take and fix it. Want to offer up a theme for development for the next two months? Pick one, group together all the issues on GitHub, and ask people to work on them. Or highlight 10 bugs and put up a poll for a most-wanted list.

As for what individual developers are doing... Well, I admit that I'm interested in what the official DW employees/team leads are doing. Individual volunteer contributors can be called out when they've done something (thanks to x for code reviews, y for writing this new feature, and z for updating the docs!), but I wouldn't want to have to tell everyone that I've not had any DW time this month because of my Threes addiction.

There might be some things that you'd want to cover with every post, but I wouldn't think that they'd all be necessary (or apropos) all the time. Really, I'd think that if you cover just a few things, then that will make us ask more questions.

Oh, and we're still doing preliminary work. Did a design for the REST API pieces we'll need, looked into our Oauth implementation some, and started on Baby's First iOS App Using Swift.

This was really immensely helpful, thank you. <3

I'm so out of the loop I was wondering who's currently active and what they're working on.

I posted a Current Contributors list in dw_dev about a month ago that should give you an idea of who has been active recently. As for what people are working on, I hope to compile a list and post it to dw_dev soon! :)

Well, yes and no I think because I meant it like what's the team like now? Who's regularly contributing?

You mean regularly as opposed to occasionally? That's a hard question to answer because everyone, myself included, tends to contribute in fits and spurts without really advertising their availability or lack thereof. I apologize if I am misunderstanding your question!

Yes, that's what I meant. I'm asking this precisely because I found it hard to get who were our regular contributors besides the people I already know and who have never stopped contributing like you, Dre, etc.

Um, so I'm an old, old user dinosaur. Karzilla with a SMASH icon doesn't seem entirely approachable. Maybe that is because I'm older and not in tune with today's standards. Just saying.

Eloise

Um, that's definitely a reaction I hadn't anticipated! The SMASH and the name Karzilla are a running joke that started years and years ago, and are directed at the codebase itself - certainly not my fellow developers! I do have other icons, but the SMASH one is my favorite right now.

I hope my words and deeds will make my good intentions clear!

Clearly you have done an excellent job of your first code push, killing every bug before letting it loose!
I could, possibly, in time, get used to the SMASH icon....

Are there any small projects that are particularly wanted at the moment, or that would help enable the big projects?

That's an interesting question. Let me think on it a bit. :)

The first half of your question is easier to answer: GHI has a "curated: mostwanted" label for stuff we want to prioritize, but right now, it only has 4 issues assigned. Two of those are already claimed, and the other two are hard problems. I'll try to see if anything warrants being added to that.

As for small things that would enable big things: that's something I'd like to help figure out, but it requires establishing development goals, and to be quite honest, I'm not sure we have any active goals right now, other than "make broken things not broken", "modernize existing code" and "jettison unused code". Our lead developer position has been vacant for about a year now, so there hasn't been a push for big new features. I'm happy to facilitate whatever our volunteers want to spend their time on, though!

https://github.com/dreamwidth/dw-free/milestones may be helpful - is there anything that can be done to help the new post entry page that leads to drafts and scheduled posts? Or is it worth another push on BML conversion?

https://github.com/dreamwidth/dw-free/pull/581 has some work on drafts and scheduled posts that needs to be reviewed and checked for merge conflicts. It's a big PR, and I haven't found the time and energy to work on it myself.

BML conversion is easier to do a bit at a time, and you're welcome to pick a page and work on it. There are tutorials on the wiki. I did a batch recently here, if you want an example: https://github.com/dreamwidth/dw-nonfree/pull/113

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Dreamwidth Development AMA for July

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