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Agenda
- Quickly review previous meeting minutes (5 min)
- How to help onboard volunteer developers
- Review next meeting agenda
Minutes
2016-09-01 Developers Forum
Attendees
Agenda
How to help volunteer developers with their contributions & make them more effective? w/ Daniel Kayiwa
- Onboarding, Bottlenecks & challenges (code review/PRs, startup time, module version hell, documentation, ...)
Notes
"Attracting new talent boosts an open source community. So, this is a key issue for the community." -Daniel
Burkes thoughts
issues someone new in the community :
- people reaching out to get dev environment set up and where can we help
- Challenges with setting up dev environment (Takes too much time to get the dev environment ready?)
- Encouraging new developers to use SDK?
- Monitor SDK usage and usefulness.
- How can openmrs community be more effective in accepting people?
- Converting volunteers to contributors? (What does this mean?)
- documentation need updated
- Embedding the doc in the application itself? (Like a README file?)
- Especially a simple tutorial
- as community have worked our way into having a shared platform but module development is happening in implementations so the ref app UI is not consistent and it creates a struggle for new volunteers
- Different paths of development can be a challenge to new people
- Javascript apps with REST API
- There should be a way to direct new developers on the best approach to take depending on what they are contributing on. (This can help reduce the bar to get someone production in a short time)
Think it would be beneficial to create short informative videos to help new members get started
- need to think about what it the process for keeping them up to date?
- keep them short (ie. a few minutes)
Believe without good documentation then the videos will not be as effective
Find ways to provide training
- Interact with volunteer to know what they are interested in and if their module aligns with volunteer's interest
- Ask module authors to spend some time mentoring volunteers on their module
Continuously evaluate where developers get into trouble
- We would benefit from being able to recognize the most common problems
- People often have trouble finding the runtime properties file
- Log the location of runtime properties.
- TODO: create a mechanism to expose this in the app (e.g., in settings)
- MySQL version issues (e.g., problem with 5.7)
- e.g., better document support versions of supporting software (tomcat, mysql, etc.)
verisoning and packaging of our applications needs refined
- there are dependencies that need to be managed and do not think it needs to be so complicated
- would like to "un-numb" developers - want them to look for items they do everyday that take maybe 5 min but would take much longer for new people so we can find solutions to these issues
Is it realistic to have someone watch JIRA tickets?
Transcripts
- Audio recording of the call: Listen online or download (available after the meeting)