We’re now running OpenHatch version 0.10.11!

It took a lot of people to get here:

The release is named for November 2010, the month that we planned out what we wanted to do. (The release has nothing to do with Soviet submarines.)

I thought you all might like to know a bit about the latest changes. These are most important things we accomplished this release:

• We had a release! This is the first time we’ve done that. We hope to do them monthly. We also have had planning meetings weekly. Jack added milestone support to our Roundup instance to make that happen.
• At the start of the release process, we labeled some bugs as “Critical”, and we fixed them all.
• TravisB led the writing of a privacy policy.
• Jack Grigg re-organized the training missions’ source code; now each mission lives in its own directory, which we hope will make it easier to add new missions.
• I made the Subversion mission guide you through its steps in the required order. (Thanks to Luke Faraone for his amusing demonstration of the need for this.)
• Jessica McKellar heroically debugged a problem where a user’s profile image crashed the Python Imaging Library.
• Jessica McKellar fixed the profile display and project answers page so that they format newlines.
• We started publishing nightly snapshots of our database. Karen built the first version of this.

If you go to the OpenHatch site, you’re interacting with version 0.10.11. For more information…

Interesting links for this release:

• The bugs closed in Roundup
• The tagged source code in Gitorious
• The new privacy policy

Other thanks:

• to Deb and Jessica for identifying some missing dependencies in the README file;
• to Michael Stone for his help with this release announcement; and
• to george1502 from Germany for fun conversation as he practiced his written English.

We didn’t get to everything. Here are some things we look forward to resolving:

• We began a tutorial on editing the OpenHatch code that I didn’t quite finish.
• Some of code that imports people’s profiles from other websites (e.g., from Launchpad and Ohloh) now uses Twisted, but not all of it.
• We didn’t get through the missions code refactoring that we aimed to. Sadly this prevented us from merging Paul Bakulich’s patch.
• The map is still slow.
• Sometimes, people joined the IRC channel without anyone saying “Hello”! We need helpful, friendly people to welcome newcomers.
• Some tests still fail. You can see that in Hudson.
• We still need a training mission for git, not just Subversion.
• For now, we still rely on the wiki to let projects tell us about their bug trackers. There is a half-done version of this in the code.

If you want to get involved, check out the source-code-etc page, but most of all: say hello to us! Join us on IRC or by email.

If you have never signed on to the OpenHatch IRC chat room, now is a good time. Just click here to use Freenode’s web chat. You’ll find dozens of people there, one of whom is,

Yours truly,

paulproteus.