Hi there! This is Greg Grossmeier, new member of the OpenHatch publicity team writing my first post for the OH blog.

As you know, OpenHatch was at PyCon this year. Asheesh and Jessica gave a great talk on diversity in usergroups specifically about the Boston Python user group.

But the OpenHatch goodness didn’t stop with just a great talk. Long time contributors and board members Karen and Asheesh organized a sprint for the website code. There was a lot of great activity during the sprint on OpenHatch, and we welcomed some new members to our community, which is amazing.

Here is some of what was accomplished (thanks to Asheesh for writing this up in an email):

• Portia, a new contributor, submitted a patch to improve the quality of the git training mission.
• Jacquie, whose first commit landed in Janaury 2012, stayed to sprint on improving the quality of the training missions, moving them toward class-based views. This also meant learning a lot about git branches and Github.
• Berry Phillips started (and completed, post-sprint) the long slog of extracting the OpenHatch bug download+parse code into a separate Python package. Having seen the deep inside of OpenHatch, he will probably spend a bunch of his future time on the frontend. (-:
• John Morrison wrote new code that integrates with the Github API to download issue data from there. This, having just been deployed, makes it possible for users of Github Issues to automatically add their bitesize bugs to OpenHatch’s volunteer opportunity finder.
• Karen Rustad fixed crucial layout issues with the redesign that Asheesh missed when he deployed the redesign, and also created (and got feedback on) a mockup for how openhatch.org/search/ can meaningfully show projects, not just individual bugs, for new contributors.
• Russia submitted her first patch, moving patch.py from mysite/missions/base/ into the vendor/ directory. She also experimented with Github pull requests, and is interested in solving another ticket.
• Walker Hale IV identified two fundamental issues with the data import/export system, and submitted patches+email conversations that addressed most of them. Jenkins’ builder for the search app is still failing; further patches to finish the issues are forthcoming. He also repeatedly answered the question for other PyCon attendees, “What is OpenHatch?” which was great.
• Daniel Mizyrycki got to know our documentation and auto-builders. He was particularly enthused by Karen’s talk on documentation, and how it can be built in a way that does not repeat oneself. We now have Sphinx documentation directly due to him.
• Pam Selle submitted fixes for various important layout problems, some which were as bad as CSS syntax errors and missing close-tags on our HTML.
• Asheesh managed to not just mentor new contributors but also write some code that is a sketch of how we can improve the bug downloading code, via removing a lot of our bookkeeping on top of Twisted, and showing that to John, who might be able to run with it.
• Pam and Walker led the battle cry to convince Asheesh to accept patches as Github pull requests, which he succumbed to. See the OpenHatch GitHub project page.
• We all made a video of the sprint, and a photo was snapped also. I don’t know where the video is, but if you see it anywhere on PyVideo, please let us know :-).

In terms of users of the site, and interest in the project,

• glyph (of Twisted) asked if we had implemented a workflow for handing new contributors to his project. Asheesh was happy to say “yes,” thanks to Jule Slootbeek’s work on the backend a few months ago.
• One new user went through the training missions and learned a lot about command-line tools on his Ubuntu machine in the process.

This was astounding! OpenHatch had 10 people at the sprint who made meaningful contributions to the code. And their enthusiasm for the project is what will push it to new great new directions.

Asheesh reflected on this and thinks a few things made this such as success:

• He prepared (during the start of the sprint, as well as over the course of the sprint) to list some good issues for newcomers.
• He asked people at the beginning of the sprint what their backgrounds are, and aimed to come up with tasks targeted at them.
• Pam showed up in the middle, adding one to our contributor count, and also encouraged us to have a group dinner. (-:
• People were quite willing to ask questions. This could have been even better — more maintainers in attendance would have been a plus. New contributors did chat a lot with each other, so Asheesh wasn’t always a bottleneck, which is great.
• The setup instructions for getting a development environment going were dramatically more reliable, compared to one year ago.

We can’t wait until next year for another great PyCon Sprint!