Well, it looks like this year it will be difficult to have the usual coding sprint, due to travel restrictions and other organizational problems. Let’s do an online one instead.
I suggest to run it sometime between 18 and 31 of october, mainly because I already took these days off work before waddlesplash brought up the idea of an online sprint again (that’s two weeks long, but you don’t have to stay online the whole time, read on for more info); and because it matches with the traditional dates for the coding sprint and BeGeistert conference. Also, this more or less lines up with Hacktoberfest, so if you work on something that’s hosted on github or gitlab, it’s an opportunity to get some hacktoberfest goodies as well (that won’t work for Haiku itself, but it could work for HaikuArchives and HaikuPorts projects, and the haiku website). This could also be used to replace Google Code-In.
If you are not familiar with our coding sprints, here is a summary of how it goes:
The idea is to gather developers in a room (usually a real meeting room but this time we’ll have to do with an IRC channel or something like that). It is open to anyone who wants to work on Haiku, resurrect their own or someone else’s BeOS app, port applications, help finalize patches that are waiting on our Gerrit for some cleanup work, or generally anything around Haiku. The idea is that you can ask for help from other developers, discuss your technical problems and see if anyone has an idea on how to solve them, etc.
You can decide to use this time to focus on one single big task, or to try to fix as many small problems as you can. You can decide to take two weeks off work like I did and work day and night on things, or just do the weekends or a few hours in the evening. It’s very flexible (let’s make the most of the online way of doing things).
At the end we can write an article on the website showing what was accomplished in two weeks.
There is no formal registration, but let us know here if you are interested and maybe what you plan to work on.
If some form of GCI is around I’m happy to help out as I did the other years, maybe we should mention a list of things that could be worked on then? (not sure if there is a list of the last GCI around that we could look into and maybe adjust to our current status)
Unfortunately I messed up when backing up the task list from the previous GCI, so, no, there is no complete backup of it. I have backups of the previous iterations, however, but it requires some work to check what has already been completed.
For hacktoberfest it works a bit differently, we need to add the hacktoberfest label to issues on github. So, I guess just have a look at the issues on haikuports and haikuarchives and tag the ones that look easy enough (or create more easy tasks). The nice thing is once we’ve done this, we can just keep the issues (the ones that are still open) for the next years.
Not from me, because at the moment I do that all the time with my colleagues and I really need a break from it. But anyone is free to set up any tool they want here.
It would be preferable to use an opensource solution for that (for example jitsi meet) instead of a closed source one
It’s probably a good idea to have an Haiku installation or development environment set up, but if you need help with that, it’s possible too.
Then it really depends what you want to dig into. Contribute your first patch to Haiku? Port your own application? Work on someone else’s application? Work on documentation, on translations, or anything else? All of this is welcome. Maybe have a list of things you want to look at, or if you don’t know, be prepared to introduce yourself and offer help to other people. I guess we will do a kind of opening session to share our plans?
We have a Jitsi Meet server for our non-profit where we already hosted some event about retro-computing with at least 30 people on so we can probably host that, I already had the idea of proposing a coding sprint using that once. I’ll see how we can arrange that.
Can ppl join up to the sprint as non-interactive spectators, to see what’s involved in such an event (and possibly get motivated by it to do something in the future)?
Hi! I’ve been lurking the forums and looking into Haiku’s codebase for quite a while now (and have some experience hacking on compilers etc). I was wondering if this could be a good chance for someone like me to break the ice into Haiku?
Or is it more a thing for Haiku devs with prior experience.
This is absolutely a great time to anyone to start getting into coding on Haiku! From the sounds of it, newcomers and old-timers alike are welcoming to participate in the event.
As for me, I’ll see if I can update some packages on HaikuPorts. Perhaps if possible, port or package up even more software for HaikuPorts.
Yes, it’s open for everyone (as is this forum and the chat channels, but maybe a special event helps with motivating people to make the first (or next) step )
Some of the recipes that could use an update are sometimes easy tasks, you could add issues on them and then follow up on interested people wanting to contribute, as @PulkoMandy said earlier, maybe we can add some easy tasks to haikuports
I think this is a great idea and I hope it spurs more contributions from the community. As PulkoMandy mentioned this could take multiple forms.
I hope to partake as much as possible.
If you fancied working on continuing the work I’ve been doing teasing apart Paladin from being tied into the underlying compiler, you could perhaps plug in clang under it?
This may be a good way to get me to work on Paladin for a few days too! Thanks for suggesting it @PulkoMandy !
