Living Statues Sprint
My trip started in August (25.8. 2010) when I jumped on the plane to Living Statues Sprint in Arnhem hosted by wonderfull people from Four Digits. Upon my arrival (I was half a day late) I was greeted by wall of tickets.
I quickly got "dirty" and start working on ticker #10995 (sitemap / navigation tile). After initial introduction into Deco / Blocks infrastructure I already got some results and first problems. Navigation portlet and Sitemap page can be now successfully replaced by navigation tile, yaaay.
I must admit that sprint was incredibly organized, tickets prepered beforehand and delagated to sprinters. So number of closed Deco / Blocks / Tiles related tickets is definetly reflecting great preparation from Rob Gietema. More on results with videos you can check on this link and judge it for yourself.
"mrs.developer" Sprint
You know the feeling when you have to rerun the buildout for the 2nd time in a row? And just because you want to add new source deactivated by default, but activated for you. Or when you simply want to hack on some code which is laying in some egg (in buildout), while keeping it sane and to create paches and apply them on production later on.
While hacking on Deco at Living Statues Sprint there was a lot of ideas flying around how to address common issues we developers have currently. Especially me and Florian Frisdorf were so much bothered by this issues that we decided to act upon. After Living Statues Sprint we headed to Munich to offices of Syslab.com Gmbh and Starzel.de to continue on this ideas.
For that reasons we started a thing called mrs.developer. mrs.developer provides buildout extension as well as comand like tool called "mrsd". For now its prove of concept that you don't have to rerun buildout if you start working on some code. Right now I can say mrs.devloper is a working patching solution, but might soon step into the area of mr.developer and also took care of handling sources. I wont go into details how it works since this is a topic for other blog post after initial phase of development is done, but more about it read on PyPi page.
But you probably didn't know that mrs.developer can dance right?
German Zope Usergroup Conference in Dresden
I was a little sceptical wheather I should go to such event since I dont speak german that well, but then again I didn't spoke spanish and I moved here for even more irrational reasons. Soon after visiting Munich I did a little tour to visit my girlfriend in Gdansk (Poland) then I was already on my way to Dresden.
I also gave a talk "Migrations with transmogrifier" (which I will soon turn into tutorial, wait for another blogpost or just contact me) which turned out to be quite well accepted, especially now that we have Plone 4 out, we (as developers) are more and more faced with a task to migrate Plone 2.X (not even Plone 3) sites to Plone 4. You might think its hard, but with tools (blueprints) developed in last months this can be not so frustrating experience.
Zope Cummunity
There was also a lot of talking about Zope community in general, especially after that Zope summit which was held few days before. There is definetly a confusion about identifying yourself as a part of Zope community, since everybody is more involved in "sister organisations": Zope2/Plone, Grok, Bluebream, repoze.bfg, ... But with ZTK 1.0 out this is starting to improve and soon we might see projects like Pylons using small parts of ZTK. Maybe even frameworks like Django might found ZTK or parts of it usefull, especially since they are trying to address similar problems which Zope community had to answer 5 years ago (I'm talking about "Making Django Apps reusable" which was broght up in last DjangoCon). repoze.bfg might be a nice way to see how ZCA can be used in non-scary way. There is a bright and exciting future ahead of us ... thats for sure.
Opengever - future of Swiss goverment
After Dresden I head back to Sevilla (via Gdnask, picking up my girlfriend) and we took well deserved week of vacations. I finally took time to visit other cities in Andalucia, after living here for a year I really haven't had that much oportunities to travel around. So I packed my car (yup this is another story, coming in a blogpost after this) and drive with my girlfriend to Cadiz, Cordoba, Huelva and just enjoy the nature and being offline for a week.
Then I got an call from guys at 4teamwork and I was already on my flight to Bern (Swiss). They are working on a goverment project for one of Swiss cantons, canton Zug. Being part of project of such size and importance is just fun from the start. They are using Plone and other future tools from Plone's future (like Dexterity, Diazo) so you will definetly hear from them some more about this amazing project.
Ljubljana, my sweet Ljubljana
After my work being done in Swiss I headed to Ljubljana. Anything I would say wouldn't be enough. Meet a lot of friends, went to all those parties I was talking people to go to and spend some time with my sisters. I guess my next visit will be next year ... and until then: "Friends its time for you to visit me. We don't have snow here. Snow is bad for you... well for sure its bad for me."
I also did some preparations for what is waiting for me the week after visit of ljubljana, and that is ...
Plone Conference 2010 Bristol
I was already on the train from Ljubaljana to Venice, taking a flight to Bristol. I met some Slovenian Plonistats in line waiting for drop-off-ing luggage. We spend all trip talking about Plone, our expectations for Plone Conference and I was more then ready for fun to begin.
I could do a whole book about Plone Conference behind us. Any word would not be enough to describe it. I think Plone community with its maturity and profesionalism, while still keeping it fun, is just a starting line how I would describe it. To keep it short i will only write something little about parts where I contributed.
If you want to see all Plone Conference's videos ... click here. Amazing video coverage.
Funny... whole Plone Conference I haven't written a line of python code. Javascript hacking all the time. Don't know if i should be proud or ashamed :)
Giving light to dark corners of z3c.form
z3c.forms everybody working with Plone use then and in the future we will use them even more (they are part of Dexterity). There is definetly a part of z3c.form which is "ugly" and "overcomplex", still its a lot better to choose some form framework which is a lot nicer, but does not provide you all of the fancy stuff that is possible with z3c.form. Also in a last year a lot of this issues were addresses and nowdays working with z3c.form can be a real pleasure. More about it you can read in my talk published on github (I'm playing with idea to actually turn/extend it into a tutorial, we'll see how I'm doing with my time) or just watch the video from the conference.
plone.app.event - final chance of recurrence events in plone
This is one of those features in Plone which nobody really want to spend a lot of money on, since its possible to move your workflow around it, but if it would be there it would definetly be used. There some atempts of succiding this in the past, but all more or less failed to bring this functionality into Plone's core. This PLIP is leaded by fearless Johannes Raggam which put on himself to bring this unpleasent task down. Plone community showed big need for it since a lot of people step up and join us coding at Plone Conference Sprint time: Tom Gross, Mike Rhodes, Dorneles Tremea, Simone Orsi, Vitaliy Podoba, Philip Bauer, Ryan Northey and me.
We are 5 days before PLIP deadline for 4.1 series of Plone. Everything looks really good and we might finish it on time, but there are still some task with which our PLIP won't be accepted. Nevertheless it was a pleasure to work with you guys and I hope in next days we bring our code to Framework team for evaluation.
github/collective - experimental (repeat after me: experimental) for possible enhancement of svn/collective
Recently (2 months ago) we started organization on github called "collective". You could consider github/collective as evaluation area for possible enhancement of current svn-collective.
Keep in mind this is experimental, experimental and once again experimental.
I'm not sure how best to emphasis this, but this is nothing officially supported or started from Plone Fundation, but they probably appreciate any effort to make development processes easier. We are just bunch of git enthusiasts who think service like github could bring some order in the mess we have in svn-collective. And instead of working in our own github accounts, we bring the spirit of Plone collective to github.
Who this evaluation are for?
github/collective is ment for:
- developers who are already familiar with git or the not feeling afraid
- their companies are already using git or even github for their work
- and for those who are aware that in case of not using github for collective this organisation might be turned off and they will have to move their code to their own user accounts (2 clicks) or import it into svn/collective (3 commands)
Right before Plone Conference sprinting weekend we already had 24 projects and 26 developers using github/collective, today I must say we are happily serveing home for 34 projects and more then 50 developers is part of it.
Why we didn't ask wider Plone Community and raise debate on mailing list first?
Main reason is that I tried to talk with many people about this and what I got back was speculations "Git is too hard to learn." and some more speculations "Github can not fit into the collective way of working together.". And I don't blame them ... really I don't. So I'm on a missing to collect some facts. Facts about wheather we could use service like github in spirit of collective and improve our way of working together. This reasies a number of different questions, from administration point of view, to documentation point of view ... since this is impossible to predict and to explore in advance we need to take this steps slowly and have some "experimental group" doing this for us.
Join us now. Send PM to garbas (on github) or just scream github/collective on #plone channel
But I don't like git, I think X (place your favorite VCS here) is better and easier to learn?
Ok heard that a lot of times. Maybe you did't notice but in text above I was not mentioning git at all. Yes I was always talking about github. But why is that different? I'm not on a mission how to convert all of you to use git, I want to explore how "social coding" might benefit us. If you don't want to use git you can also use Hg with github or you can even use svn to checkout and commit to github project (this is only limited to master/trunk but this might change soon). But why github and not bitbucket for example? I might be a little bit biased here because I'm a git user myself, but some facts are not to be missed. The only real "social coding" is actually happening on github, at least thats why numbers (of users) say. Well if not real at least more of "social coding" is happening at github and we will see our results faster.
And after evaluation period?
We'll try to investigate github for a bit, see how it fits our "collective-ness". If I say we some time frame after which we will bring this into discussion to plone developers / users list, I would be shooting blank. It might be one or two months from now, it might be more ... I certain that we will all know when time will come. Right now I wont focus on any date, but I will try to make github/collective a friendly place to share code.
Final thoughts
I had a blasting 2 months behind me. I learned a lot, met a lot of great people and there are exciting time ahead of me.
Since I'm a freelancer and there is no big project waiting for me in short future, please contact me if I you might need some help. Maybe my blog is not saying much about what I'm good at (need to change this soon), but I'm mastering lots of Plone aspects:
- Migrations from Plone 2.X to Plone
- Newsletters via Singing & Dancing
- Diazo(xdv) / Deliverance
- Archetypes / Dexterity development and all that comes with it
- z3c.form: I can convince them to do (almost) anything
Happy Plone year...