OpenHatch 0.11.03 is released
Dear blog readers,
I’m besmirked to announce that our team of crazed contributors has created OpenHatch version 0.11.03.
It wasn’t as big a release as in some past months, and so I wrote about how we’re going to improve that in my email to the Devel list (quoted below). The highlights of the release include:
- New contributors to the code: Paul Bakulich, Joel Rivera, and Jairo Lopez
- Karen redesigned the front page for when you aren’t logged in
- Asheesh (whose words you’re reading right now) spent a bunch of time fixing the buildout process so that it reliably finishes.
- Jack Grigg (pythonian4000) worked furiously on improving the code quality of the code that downloads bugs from bug trackers and populates the volunteer opportunity finder.
- We have a plan for giving more people (other than just Asheesh) access to the main OpenHatch server.
Here are the lovely names and faces of people who committed to git or filed bugs that were closed in 0.11.03:
Work on the 0.11.04 release (due on April 30) is already underway. You can see what we’re planning by looking at the tickets in the milestone. We need more contributors — and this time, we picked tickets for the release that make it easy for people to jump in and make a difference.
Below is what I wrote to Devel:
Whew, everybody.
A few days late, OpenHatch 0.11.03 is out. I’ve pushed a tag to git.
I want to take a few minutes here to thank all the people who helped us go forward, from long-time contributors like Karen, Jack, and Jessica, to the
new folks who recently showed up in the git log: Paul Bakulich (AKA palhmbs on IRC) and Jairo and Joel, whom I met at PyCon.
There are some important changes in this release’s git log:
- Jack has converted many of the bug trackers to be asynchronous, laying the groundwork, and helped us move forward from some sucky code I wrote a year ago (the “Epoch” class — may it rest in peace).
- Karen did a major refresh of the front page, which helped people see how the site can help *them*.
- Jairo added monitoring of the bug import and nightly emailing script,and together we (I think) nailed down a bunch of problems that were causing bug import to get stuck.
- Joel found and fixed a bug that was causing some users to not succeed at logging in. This required chasing down buggy dependencies and making a package, and getting into our own dependency installation system.
- Paul, after a long time in IRC, showed up in the git log for the first time, fixing broken links, adjusting documentation, and adding the super-neat django-debug-toolbar.
We have a lot to be proud of!
It does seem like a smaller release than in past months. I think some of that can be traced back to management: I’m not happy with my own performance this past month and a half. In particular, I think that I didn’t do a good job as project maintainer in setting highly concrete goals for the release.
For our early releases, there were a lot of bugs to fix in the site, and it was easy to figure out what direction was “forward”. As we get past that now, I think that we need more vision for what the site will become, and how we will get there. If we can share this vision in a clear fashion, we will be able to figure out how to help newcomers and old-timers make a difference in the project.
Additionally, in a more mundane note, I wasn’t very timely this month with patch review. I’ll need help; Jack, for example, even though you’re retiring from coding soon, maybe you’d be willing to do more patch review? I think we should also reconfigure the bug tracker so that it’s easier for people to stay in top of project updates; I’ve filed some bugs to request changes along those lines:
I’m learning a lot about project management from all this!
I’m proud of all the work we’ve put into OpenHatch, and I’m truly grateful to be working with all of you.
For the next few days, my priority with OpenHatch is to come up with a proposal for granting shell (and deployment) access to more people. even though you’re retiring from coding (soon), maybe you would be willing to do patch review, too. Once that’s done, I’m going to think through what goals make sense for a short April release, as well as what big changes we can set our sights on for May. I encourage you all to think big, too!