Apparently we should be doing this:
“the policy is that any commit of stuff created by someone else must be marked as such, either by ‘Submitted by: ‘or ‘Obtained from: ‘ being part of the log. ”
ie) if applying a patch from an issue tracker, or if applying code that someone else wrote and passed on to you in another way (IM, personal mail, mailing list, git repository).
Well… I did it. Finally talked at ApacheCon to about 20 people, so not very intimidating. Sanjiva’s WS/REST talk had one section of the conference (post Roy’s packed talk) and Sandor Temme had the other group for his 2 hour talk on HTTP Server.
I improved the talk a little with help from Bjorn Townsend, and then with some suggestions from Brian McCallister I pimped it up such that it wasn’t just a bunch of bullet points. I also pulled a chunk of the content out into post-it notes that only I would be able to see.
Unfortunately that failed at launch - I could show the audience my notes on the screen, but not reverse it so that they saw the presentation. So I had to fly without notes, which was irritating as there were various bits I didn’t cover.
Reaction to the talk was positive - and a couple of POI committer/contributors (Yegor and David) were happy that the original description was satisfactorily achieved. Generally I think the crowd was ASF aware, rather than people who are only just starting to contribute to OSS. They were probably learning about REST and HTTP. That’s one of the tricky things at ApacheCon; the business track is very attractive to the ASF developer audience, and it slowly merges into an ASF track which is less of interest to either ASF audience or ASF users.
For the presentation notes, see the following ’site’.
Less done on Tuesday. A bit more Lang coding, an ApacheCon planners meeting, show Nathan off to Apache (general thought…. what’s that orange coloured fast moving thing that is lurching dangerously near me), dinner at a Chinese restaurant, a couple of Murphy’s at an Irish pub and some dodgy geezers on the street giving Santiago and I trouble as we headed back to the hotel.
Time for Day 3.
Or at least, ApacheCon first 24 hrs.
Wife, child and I got in around 9pm on Sunday night and rented a Prius. An upgrade from the land-shark that they’d originally offered us. Carrie seemed to figure it out quickly, so all is happy (until the pressure starts for me to buy her one). We made it to the hotel happily, with sleeping boy, and when room service showed up with the much needed, though pricey, dinner - said boy was wide awake instantly. Suffice to say, I was reading “Reptiles and Amphibians” with him at 1am and falling asleep.
The morning started with family things - swimming in the pool, eating as much as we could in the buffet breakfast (pricey again, but when you’ve gotta eat…). Then family went off and I went over to the Hackathon. Time to try hard to not be the antisocial sod that I usually am.
Along with many old faces, I met Vadim Gritsenko, Matthieu Riou and Rony Flatscher(briefly). Jason Hunter had t-shirts for all on offer and Bjorn, Ben and I worked on Commons Lang 2.4. To reward them for figuring out all the issues, I went off and found 8 more in JIRA that we should consider. Bet they’re glad I saved them from the Axis 1.x and Commons Validator issues they were working on before I sat down. I also released a jira plugin bugfix for the FilterList plugin.
Tea time rolled around and back up to the room with C+N to consider dinner. That turned into cereal and toddler acrobatics - with a bit of blogging. Then back to the evening hackathon a bit later methinks.
Google’s, Yahoo’s, HP’s, Covalent’s, Tetsuya’s, Two Sigma Investments’ bitch.
I’ve taken the plunge this year and I’m going to be speaking at ApacheCon 2007 in Atlanta. It’s at 3pm on the 15th of November and is called “How to make Friends and Influence Projects“. At the time the title seemed witty, though I’ve already renamed it to “How to Make Patches and Influence Projects” in my head (and probably on the slides too).
The synposis is:
Committers get all the attention on a project, but there is a huge amount that non-committers can do even without that elusive commit karma. In this session we cover various strategies that can be applied to make a difference to an open source project, either to bring a dormant project back to life or to prove yourself the ideal committer.
It’s a mix of tactics and approaches on how to contribute effectively to open source projects, whether all you have time for is to report a bug, or whether you want to see a release happen. There’s nothing very Apache related about it, hopefully it’ll be of interest to those who don’t want to know about Apache James, WS vs REST and HTTP Server.
Mostly I’m worried about using a mic and standing on stage. I’ve never used a mic before, and I’ve never looked down on people while talking, it’s always been at the same height.
The last time I did any speaking it was a disaster (it was an exercise in a PR class). Prior to that it had gone well in JUGs. I think because I have to be excited about the topic, it’s not something that can be turned on and off for me. This is a subject I believe strongly in, so I’m looking forward to it. There’s no reason why a contributor can’t put forward a quality patch to a project they barely know.
So register with the early bird program in the next week and a bit and save some cash 
Akin to a previous post, this is a thought dump on something that comes up while looking at project reports in the ASF board meeting.
Sometimes a project will report that they had a face to face meeting, or are planning one, and the immediate concern will be whether they are organizing it openly. Face to face meetings are hugely valuable (thus the emphasis the foundation puts on the ApacheCon conferences), but making sure that all of the contributors are aware of the meeting is also important. Discuss the plans for the meeting on the dev@ mailing list; make sure that contributors are welcome to attend if they can.
One worry might be how to refuse those of trollish behaviour. I think it helps that it’s a lot, lot harder to be a troll in a face to face meeting. The author of the BileBlog attended the Struts/WebWork BOF (birds of a feather) a few years back and it didn’t turn into a bile ridden criticism of all the things they’re doing wrong. Most likely your favourite troll won’t show, will be quiet, or even better - will be valuable.
Another worry might be that the discussion will be all about user questions and not development discussion. You should be so lucky. If that turns out to be the case, embrace it and set aside part of the meeting for that focus (a third or so perhaps).
As with all of these thought dumps (and I hope to do a lot more), this is what I’ve culled from the information flying by within Apache - it may not be 100% the answer.
From Justin’s OSCON talk the other day:
We (the ASF) are never good at giving the long term scheduling in my view, so thought I’d share.
This is something that I think I now have straight, so here’s an info share. The initial premise is: “You are a person who wants to donate code to the ASF”.
This is something that I think hasn’t been that clear. I’ll update the above if I find that it is incorrect.
Updated 20070719 in line with Aaron and Wendy’s comments
