Posts from September 2012
Back to Work on Joomla
Finally catching up on Back to Work, in particular Cascading Wave of Bad:
Merlin: …I'm sure Joomla can be very, very pretty—have you ever used Joomla?
Dan: No.
Merlin: That control panel. Oh my God. The control panel—it looks like somebody dropped a thesaurus. It doesn't make a lick of sense to me.
Nothing but love or our open-source brothers and sisters in the Joomla world, but man…that control panel is exactly why I decided to go with Drupal.
The Drupal Ladder
I mentioned the Drupal Ladder initiative in my post about DrupalCon Munich, but didn't really talk about what it is. I expect that most of my non-client-work Drupal time for the forseeable future will be focused on the Ladder, so a bit of explanation is probably in order.
The Goal of the Drupal Ladder is to have 1% of the Drupal Community contributing to core by 2014. That's the short version. A very low percentage of users on drupal.org have contributed to core, and we'd like to increase that percentage so that more people are helping maintain the system that we all use on a daily basis.
This goal is being pursued primarily through two differend kinds of events: learn sprints and issue sprints at local meetup groups. During learn sprints, attendees work through a lesson on the Drupal core contribution ladder. During issue sprints, attendees pair up and work to make some progress on a Drupal core issue. There's more to the initiative than that, but this is the important part, "where the rubber meets the road," if you will.
Over the past few weeks, a steering committee has been assembled to lead the effort and divvy up the work a bit. Before this, there really wasn't much headway being made on issues. There are a few parts that make up the DrupalLadder.org site: the Lessons module defines the lesson content type and surrounding functionality, the Lesson Ladder module organizes those lessons into sequential ladder rungs, and the Drupal Ladder install profile contains the lesson content that appears on DrupalLadder.org. The use of this install profile is two-fold: right now, it runs DrupalLadder.org, but soon it will also include sample modules and intentional bugs so that those who are working through the lessons can do so on a local dev site running the install profile. They will be able to use that site itself to make changes, create and apply patches, and so on.
With the formation of the steering committee, I am now the new issue sprint…guy? Leader? As the new Issue Sprint Whatever-I-Am, my focus will be on making it easy for people to start or continue running issue sprints with their local community. To begin with, I've freshened up our how-to for sprint leads, but I've got a lot more to do.
The core mentoring folks have graciously allowed us to make use of a new task-tracking tool that they've developed to make it easier to keep track of who is doing what during the core mentoring hours in IRC. I'm going to work with them to fix some bugs in the system, and get it ready to be rolled into an install profile. This way, we will be able to setup our own task tracking site so that I won't need to bug xjm each time a new sprint leader needs the user role that will allow them to do their thing, and things like that. All user groups who are hosting issue sprints can track their issues in one place, and ensure that sprinters don't wind up working on the same thing (thus duplicating effort).
I'm also going to try to talk to more sprint leaders and find out what is and is not working for them, and determine what I can be doing to iron out the rough patches. At this point, I don't really have any idea what this might entail. What works well in our group here in DC may not work well for a group in Oklahoma, for example, so I'm going to start from the lessons we've learned along the way but remain open to feedback from others.
I'm really excited to have more people getting involved in organizing the Ladder initative, and especially so now that we've broken the parts of the initiative into separate responsibilities. With different people focusing on different parts, I think we'll make a lot more progress than we have in taking care of the tasks in our issue queues, and the renewal of interest in the initiative will help get a few more sprints off the ground!
Category:
DrupalCon Munich
DrupalCon Munich took place last week—well, last-last week, I guess—and it was pretty rad. I just got home a couple days ago, myself. My wife Erin and I figured that as long as I was in Germany already, we may as well make a trip of it, so she flew out on Friday (the sprint day of the con) and we spent the weekend in Munich, then flew up to Berlin for the following week. The whole trip was a blast, but we're talking about DrupalCon here.
If I'm being honest, the first couple days of the conference were largely lost on me. I was more jet-lagged than I thought, and I think a little bit culture-shocked by failing to understand just about everything that was being said around me. I took a year of German in college (eight years ago now), but that did remarkably little for my ability to communicate with people there.
Once my sleep cycle evened out and I got my legs under me, I had a great time. I wound up spending a lot of time talking with the newly-former Drupal Ladder Steering Committee about what we were doing and how, which was exactly the refresher I needed for that project. The Drupal Ladder has been my primary focus in the contrib world for a couple months, but I hadn't been very enthusiastic about it of late. Doling out responsibilities and making some decisions during DrupalCon made me feel a lot better about where we're going and how we're going to get there, so the week was worth it just for that.
I also really enjoyed the "Get Involved with Core Sprint" on Friday. This was a sprint led primarily by the core mentoring crew (meaning xjm and tim.plunkett this time around), and it went swimmingly. Cathy and I hosted a BOF on Thursday afternoon to help new sprinters get setup with a local Drupal 8 site, and it wound up being remarkably effective: a bunch of first-time sprinters arrived Friday morning all setup and ready to contribute! Fellow Lullabots Addi and Joe led a workshop in the morning to get people more completely setup: local dev site, git, how to use IRC and the issue queue, etc. Between the BOF and the workshop, the entire group was firing on all cylinders by noon.
A ton of issues were worked on, and it seemed like everyone knew what they were doing: I kept wandering the room, looking for people that needed help, but no one did! Instead, I spent most of my time looking for more issues that people could work on because the group was chugging through them so quickly.
Talking about the Ladder and helping out at the sprint were definitely the highlights of my DrupalCon. I only attended a few sessions, including the two I spoke at (Drupal Ladder and Making Meetups Work), and didn't even make it to any core conversations, but it was a very productive week. Now I need to go back and watch the videos for a bunch of sessions I missed!
