OpenHatch newsletter, September 2012
Welcome to the 2nd OpenHatch newsletter!
We met our first fundraising goal as a non-profit organization! Thank you Google, Wikimedia, and an anonymous donor, who said:
Open source has opened doors for me continuously for more than a decade. With open source, I have touched the lives of millions. I believe and hope that helping OpenHatch will help to open similar doors for many others.
Congratulations to OpenHatch board member Jessica McKellar for being selected as a keynote speaker for PyCon 2013!
Fall 2012 Open Source Comes to Campus is ramping up!
We’re working with college computer clubs to make open source collaboration a part of students’ fall semester through a program called Open Source Comes to Campus. Our next event is in Baltimore, MD, the weekend of September 15.
We’re looking for more campuses, staffers, and sponsors for the fall 2012 series.
We’ve also been testing the curriculum, which resulted in a first patch by a new contributor to WordPress!
Code changes on the website
In this month, in the website and bug importers, we’ve:
- Fixed a couple of escaping-related bugs related to cross-site scripting, reported by a friendly (if mysterious) anonymous person.
- Improved documentation, with thanks to Jessica McKellar for reporting an issue, and
Asheesh Laroia, Daniel Mizyrycki, and Adrian Ancona for writing more docs. - At a sprint, Karen Rustad and Asheesh Laroia laid the groundwork for moving much OpenHatch JS code to the Backbone.js library, including adding the first RESTful API.
- Emilien Klein fixed a bug where editing one’s list of projects was not working (thanks to Sarah Sharp for reporting). This is Emilien’s first contribution; thank you!
- The bug importers gained a command line interface, which should make testing it much simpler.
- A special thanks to John Morrissey and Mark Holmquist for code review.
As you can see, there’s plenty of opportunity for frontend (JS/CSS/HTML) and backend (Python, scrapy, Django) coding in the OpenHatch web app. New people are always welcome!
Event wrapups
Jessica McKellar wrote up Boston Python’s first Intermediate Python Workshop. Read for lots of detail. One feedback quote to illustrate outcomes:
Thank you all so much for holding these workshops, more than anything I’ve tried they really motivate me to actually work on learning something new on my own time. Thank you thank you thank you!!
Karen Rustad spoke on “Learn to contribute to Open Source!” at SF PyLadies along with longtime Django committers Jeremy Dunck and Alex Gaynor (incidentally, Alex helped us organize an Open Source Comes to Campus event last year at his alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic).
Asheesh and Karen presented Open Source Community Growth as a User Experience Problem at OSCON.
Join the events mailing list to share your experiences and get help with making your events beginnger-friendly.
Get involved
Back in June Adrian Ancona wrote a nice blog post about beginning to contribute to OpenHatch’s website code — a contribution which is now live.