I wouldn't be able to attend the hackathon in person but would love to sit in from afar, perhaps someone could open a skype session.

--Doug

Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
hi everyone!


i think we really should have a hackathon to speed up lenya development and give the developer and user community a boost. wdyt? a meeting place in the ruhrgebiet could easily be arranged, and even cheap or free private accommodation, but from what i know of the other lenya devs, somewhere in switzerland or southern germany would probably be more practical...

personally i'd be willing to take a few days off and fly my humble ass to almost anywhere in europe, provided there's going to be enough advance notice to get a cheap ticket. what about you other folks?

i'm volunteering to coordinate the whole thing, but depending on the location, somebody who actually lives in the area needs to do the grunt work of securing a place.

as to timing, i suggest something in the second quarter of 2007, probably in april or may. we could also meet during the apachecon europe, which takes place from may 1 to 4 in amsterdam, or better yet, before or after. if you think amsterdam is an ok place, i'll get in touch with arje of cocoongt fame - maybe we can find a place in the same building that has hosted the get together for the last 2 years.

regarding the agenda, let me first state that i'd like to see 1.4.0 out well before the hackathon, so that we can have some breathing space for more visional ideas.
topics that come to mind are:

* improve and enlarge the lenya community
* resyncing with the world - users use 1.2, devs work on 1.4, and the two fractions barely seem to know the other exists
* syncing with cocoon 2.2, talk about spring
* writing down lenya coding best practises, discuss and adopt "convention over configuration" * improve the storage backend, provide a migration path between lenya versions * define what lenya is good at, and seriously figure out reasons why the world needs another cms :)
* make lenya more data-friendly, loosen the document-centric structure.
* hack and code and test and break stuff and have fun.

as a side note, i'd also like to revive the discussion of "code ownership". i agree that "ownership" is bad, but "code shepherding" could be a good thing. code shepherds would be people who feel particularly responsible for particular sub-systems and have (by merit) a certain authority on new additions and architectural decisions. such "code shepherds" could then give talks at the hackathon about their pet code and maybe even tutor newbies to help them become developers. as it is now, there are traces of really nice "best practises" all over the code, but they tend to be swamped by code contributions that do not honor them (which is natural, since those practises are not documented). a code shepherd could demand consistency and suggest improvements to patches which are not in keeping with good practice. an additional benefit of this scheme is that we can identify sections of code that are unmaintained and not thoroughly understood. ideally, each subsystem should have its own shepherd. (i know, this is not very realistic atm given the size of the dev community, but it's a worthy goal to strive for.)


i'd also suggest to ask around on the user list for advanced users who are interested in learning about particular parts of the lenya code and become devs. we would then have to organize special tutorials for those users to give them a kick start, but it should certainly be worth the effort.


that's it for now, i'm looking forward to your comments.

best,

jörn



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