Entry tags:
Progress Report: March 16, 2009
Oh my, it is Monday again, isn't it. (I know that's how I started last week's update, but ... I'm pretty sure *someone* has set things onto fast-forward while I wasn't looking.)
1. CODE PROGRESS (BY THE NUMBERS)
Quick bug-related stats about this week: We resolved a total of 32 bugs this week (which is lower than last week because many of them were more complex issues that took more significant amounts of time), and are currently at a total of 39 open bugs blocking open beta, with only 31 of those items not having some kind of a patch already written and waiting review. We've hit a grand total of 293 total items resolved so far -- which means that we've resolved 57% of the items we've opened. (And considering how many of the items are completely new functionality that needs to be scheduled far down the road, I think that's pretty impressive.)
Now, not all of the items that we've opened are bugs --![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rho actually did a survey of Bugzilla the other day that I found really interesting. She looked at every tenth bug, and found that 34% of the bugs she was looking at were additions of completely new functionality, for instance, while 36% were making fixes and cleanup to the codebase we inherited and 22% were fixing up bugs that we introduced with our other changes. Since the long-term goal, once we finish our initial development cycle, is for our development to fall more-or-less in thirds -- 1/3 developing and introducing new features and seriously extending the existing features, 1/3 fixing things that annoy us (either bug-wise or usability-wise), and 1/3 doing "code cleanup" (of the invisible-to-users-but-valuable-to-the-ability-to-maintain-the-code backend kind), that spot check reassured me that we're doing pretty well so far. (Mind you, not all of those items she looked at have been resolved already, but it does show me that we're logging to-do items in more-or-less the right proportions.)
2. BOOTCAMP
One of the things that we've been really excited about doing the past few weeks: code bootcamp. As part of our commitment to Open Source, and as part of our belief that we should pay forward all the time and effort that people took to teach *us* about all the useful ways in which we can participate in the Open Source community, we've been spending lots of time with people who are new to the Open Source community or to Perl programming in general.
Right now, our mentoring system is unofficial, but over time we want to make it more structured and easier to participate in, as well as offering lectures and tutorials on best practices. For instance, we provide development environments for people who are just starting out and don't have the resources to run their own, and we've been compiling the collected wisdom of everyone with more experience with the code on our Wiki for people to peruse.
Right now, over half of our active code contributors are people who have never worked on an Open Source project before. We think that's awesome. We want to use the process that we develop to nurture the next generation of Open Source contributors -- everyone starts somewhere, and we think we're really well-positioned to create a positive first experience.
This week we welcomeursamajor, zarhooie, invisionary, and owl to our Dreamhack community, and we're looking forward to seeing what they contribute as they level up their skills!
3. STYLISH
For those of you who have been waiting to see what our styles team comes up with, we're getting closer. The team has provided the code that is the "next generation" styles core (known internally as core2) for the code review process, and once that code is committed and tested, we'll be able to let people start writing styles that take advantage of all of the enhancements and changes we've made. The team is also working to port both the available LJ styles and the styles we've been licensed for use on Dreamwidth to use the new core2 functions. As we get those done, we'll be asking people to contribute layout layers and CSS, so we can offer a number of different journal looks "out-of-the-box".
The major goals of this project have been to standardize the options available to all styles, so that people don't need to manually hack (for instance) nested tag support into individual styles -- it'll be available directly in the core. We're also doing extensive work to standardize the options available in the customization wizard and make it much, much easier for individual journal owners to customize their journal's look using only CSS instead of having to learn a whole new programming language to dress up their journals.
The styles team has been working tirelessly on this goal, and the amount of stuff they're doing to extend the S2 programming/layout language is amazing. While we might not have all of the LJ styles fully ported over to use the new core2 by the time we launch to open beta, the styles team is working diligently to get them done, and we hope to add new styles and layouts frequently once we launch.
4. HEY, THAT'S COOL.
As we get nearer to open-beta launch, we've been thinking about the best way to solicit feedback from you, the users, and how we can make sure that our development efforts are guided by how people are actually using the site. In addition to a more-formal suggestions process, one of the things I really wanted to do was have people whose role is to go out and observe how people are using "social media" -- both Dreamwidth itself, and other services that overlap with the audience and use cases for Dreamwidth -- and report back to us: hey, there's this neat thing that people are doing, and right now it's really cumbersome and manual. Can we make that easier?
I had this in the back of my head as something to set up after open-beta launch, and I'm pleased to announce that it started happening organically.zvi, one of our closed-beta testers, started dropping me little notes observing what people were doing and how it could be made easier. So last weekend I asked her to spearhead that project, and she agreed.
So, if you have a concrete suggestion for how to improve Dreamwidth, you can use the suggestions process once we get it set up, or add it to the wishlists on the Wiki right now. But if all you know is that you want it to be easier to do something you use the service to do, check out our new community and leave a message there:
![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_coolhunters
5. CLIENT SOFTWARE
Many people have asked about whether or not Dreamwidth will support their favorite desktop client for posting. We're keeping a list of clients that we've tested and whether or not they work:
Compatible Clients
This week, however, we're happy to announce the development launch of the first Dreamwidth-native client, for the Mac platform: iDream! The project is spearheaded and managed byzarch, and it's managed on BitBucket:
iDream
Development is brand new, but I'm already really excited about it. Anyone who's interested in programming a similar client for another platform can drop us a line. We definitely want to offer Dreamwidth-native clients for as many platforms as possible; while many existing LiveJournal clients will be usable with Dreamwidth, they won't be able to take advantage of all of our nifty changes.
6. T MINUS...
I've mentioned several times throughout this update that we're getting closer and closer to open beta. We still don't have a target date -- we'd love to open sooner rather than later, but there are a number of things that have to get done in order for us to be comfortable in widely accepting new users. After all, we don't want to give you a bad impression right up front ...
Major things that need to be done before we open up to open beta include fixing the most critical bugs, finishing up the new journal style core and making available at least a few journal styles, writing the basic set of FAQs and rewriting the site copy to be more clear in many places, and finishing up integrating the payment system into the account creation system. We also have the refining touches to put on our journal importer, and we really want to have cross-posting functionality at or near open beta.
It seems like a lot to get done -- and honestly, there have been times I've looked at the list and wanted to hide under the desk! -- but we're knocking the tasks down one by one. It does mean, however, that we haven't yet been able to set our date for open-beta launch. While we've mentioned time frames we hope to launch in, we still can't commit to them absolutely.
What we *can* promise is that we will give you guys 30 days' advance notice for our open beta launch. This is so everyone can prepare well in advance.
(We also really don't want to go much past May 1. Why's that? Because![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
mark and janinedog's wedding is at the end of May, and so Mark's going to be occupied doing groom-type things that month.)
7. HELP WANTED
rb, our accessibility coordinator, is looking for screenreader users to test some specific things for us. This won't be "teach us accessibility 101", but more in the way of checking specific tasks to make sure that they're as screenreader-friendly as we can make them. If you have some time to donate, you can contact Ricky at ricky@notdoneliving.net, or subscribe to the dw-accessibility mailing list:
dw-accessibility
It's also likely thatdomtheknight, our QA coordinator, will be looking for additional beta testers who meet specific criteria this week or next week. If you're interested, we'll be posting to the dw-help mailing list when we need people, so you can subscribe there:
dw-help
8. TALK TO US!
Mailing list volume has steadily been declining as we move closer to open beta, but it's still there as a resource! If you'd like to talk about the project, ask questions, or just lurk and see what we're up to, you can join the dw-discuss mailing list.
For once-daily (more or less) updates on what-we-did-today, check out our Dreamwidth Twitter account.
For more real-time discussion, commentary, and the ability to consign things to hell -- or at least, to our irc bot "hEll" -- come join us
in irc:
irc.dwscoalition.org, port 6667, channel #dw
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Email me at denise@dreamwidth.org, or comment here. We'll see you next week, same bat time, same bat channel.
1. CODE PROGRESS (BY THE NUMBERS)
Quick bug-related stats about this week: We resolved a total of 32 bugs this week (which is lower than last week because many of them were more complex issues that took more significant amounts of time), and are currently at a total of 39 open bugs blocking open beta, with only 31 of those items not having some kind of a patch already written and waiting review. We've hit a grand total of 293 total items resolved so far -- which means that we've resolved 57% of the items we've opened. (And considering how many of the items are completely new functionality that needs to be scheduled far down the road, I think that's pretty impressive.)
Now, not all of the items that we've opened are bugs --
rho actually did a survey of Bugzilla the other day that I found really interesting. She looked at every tenth bug, and found that 34% of the bugs she was looking at were additions of completely new functionality, for instance, while 36% were making fixes and cleanup to the codebase we inherited and 22% were fixing up bugs that we introduced with our other changes. Since the long-term goal, once we finish our initial development cycle, is for our development to fall more-or-less in thirds -- 1/3 developing and introducing new features and seriously extending the existing features, 1/3 fixing things that annoy us (either bug-wise or usability-wise), and 1/3 doing "code cleanup" (of the invisible-to-users-but-valuable-to-the-ability-to-maintain-the-code backend kind), that spot check reassured me that we're doing pretty well so far. (Mind you, not all of those items she looked at have been resolved already, but it does show me that we're logging to-do items in more-or-less the right proportions.)2. BOOTCAMP
One of the things that we've been really excited about doing the past few weeks: code bootcamp. As part of our commitment to Open Source, and as part of our belief that we should pay forward all the time and effort that people took to teach *us* about all the useful ways in which we can participate in the Open Source community, we've been spending lots of time with people who are new to the Open Source community or to Perl programming in general.
Right now, our mentoring system is unofficial, but over time we want to make it more structured and easier to participate in, as well as offering lectures and tutorials on best practices. For instance, we provide development environments for people who are just starting out and don't have the resources to run their own, and we've been compiling the collected wisdom of everyone with more experience with the code on our Wiki for people to peruse.
Right now, over half of our active code contributors are people who have never worked on an Open Source project before. We think that's awesome. We want to use the process that we develop to nurture the next generation of Open Source contributors -- everyone starts somewhere, and we think we're really well-positioned to create a positive first experience.
This week we welcome
ursamajor, zarhooie, invisionary, and owl to our Dreamhack community, and we're looking forward to seeing what they contribute as they level up their skills!3. STYLISH
For those of you who have been waiting to see what our styles team comes up with, we're getting closer. The team has provided the code that is the "next generation" styles core (known internally as core2) for the code review process, and once that code is committed and tested, we'll be able to let people start writing styles that take advantage of all of the enhancements and changes we've made. The team is also working to port both the available LJ styles and the styles we've been licensed for use on Dreamwidth to use the new core2 functions. As we get those done, we'll be asking people to contribute layout layers and CSS, so we can offer a number of different journal looks "out-of-the-box".
The major goals of this project have been to standardize the options available to all styles, so that people don't need to manually hack (for instance) nested tag support into individual styles -- it'll be available directly in the core. We're also doing extensive work to standardize the options available in the customization wizard and make it much, much easier for individual journal owners to customize their journal's look using only CSS instead of having to learn a whole new programming language to dress up their journals.
The styles team has been working tirelessly on this goal, and the amount of stuff they're doing to extend the S2 programming/layout language is amazing. While we might not have all of the LJ styles fully ported over to use the new core2 by the time we launch to open beta, the styles team is working diligently to get them done, and we hope to add new styles and layouts frequently once we launch.
4. HEY, THAT'S COOL.
As we get nearer to open-beta launch, we've been thinking about the best way to solicit feedback from you, the users, and how we can make sure that our development efforts are guided by how people are actually using the site. In addition to a more-formal suggestions process, one of the things I really wanted to do was have people whose role is to go out and observe how people are using "social media" -- both Dreamwidth itself, and other services that overlap with the audience and use cases for Dreamwidth -- and report back to us: hey, there's this neat thing that people are doing, and right now it's really cumbersome and manual. Can we make that easier?
I had this in the back of my head as something to set up after open-beta launch, and I'm pleased to announce that it started happening organically.
zvi, one of our closed-beta testers, started dropping me little notes observing what people were doing and how it could be made easier. So last weekend I asked her to spearhead that project, and she agreed. So, if you have a concrete suggestion for how to improve Dreamwidth, you can use the suggestions process once we get it set up, or add it to the wishlists on the Wiki right now. But if all you know is that you want it to be easier to do something you use the service to do, check out our new community and leave a message there:
dw_coolhunters5. CLIENT SOFTWARE
Many people have asked about whether or not Dreamwidth will support their favorite desktop client for posting. We're keeping a list of clients that we've tested and whether or not they work:
Compatible Clients
This week, however, we're happy to announce the development launch of the first Dreamwidth-native client, for the Mac platform: iDream! The project is spearheaded and managed by
zarch, and it's managed on BitBucket: iDream
Development is brand new, but I'm already really excited about it. Anyone who's interested in programming a similar client for another platform can drop us a line. We definitely want to offer Dreamwidth-native clients for as many platforms as possible; while many existing LiveJournal clients will be usable with Dreamwidth, they won't be able to take advantage of all of our nifty changes.
6. T MINUS...
I've mentioned several times throughout this update that we're getting closer and closer to open beta. We still don't have a target date -- we'd love to open sooner rather than later, but there are a number of things that have to get done in order for us to be comfortable in widely accepting new users. After all, we don't want to give you a bad impression right up front ...
Major things that need to be done before we open up to open beta include fixing the most critical bugs, finishing up the new journal style core and making available at least a few journal styles, writing the basic set of FAQs and rewriting the site copy to be more clear in many places, and finishing up integrating the payment system into the account creation system. We also have the refining touches to put on our journal importer, and we really want to have cross-posting functionality at or near open beta.
It seems like a lot to get done -- and honestly, there have been times I've looked at the list and wanted to hide under the desk! -- but we're knocking the tasks down one by one. It does mean, however, that we haven't yet been able to set our date for open-beta launch. While we've mentioned time frames we hope to launch in, we still can't commit to them absolutely.
What we *can* promise is that we will give you guys 30 days' advance notice for our open beta launch. This is so everyone can prepare well in advance.
(We also really don't want to go much past May 1. Why's that? Because
mark and janinedog's wedding is at the end of May, and so Mark's going to be occupied doing groom-type things that month.)7. HELP WANTED
rb, our accessibility coordinator, is looking for screenreader users to test some specific things for us. This won't be "teach us accessibility 101", but more in the way of checking specific tasks to make sure that they're as screenreader-friendly as we can make them. If you have some time to donate, you can contact Ricky at ricky@notdoneliving.net, or subscribe to the dw-accessibility mailing list:dw-accessibility
It's also likely that
domtheknight, our QA coordinator, will be looking for additional beta testers who meet specific criteria this week or next week. If you're interested, we'll be posting to the dw-help mailing list when we need people, so you can subscribe there:dw-help
8. TALK TO US!
Mailing list volume has steadily been declining as we move closer to open beta, but it's still there as a resource! If you'd like to talk about the project, ask questions, or just lurk and see what we're up to, you can join the dw-discuss mailing list.
For once-daily (more or less) updates on what-we-did-today, check out our Dreamwidth Twitter account.
For more real-time discussion, commentary, and the ability to consign things to hell -- or at least, to our irc bot "hEll" -- come join us
in irc:
irc.dwscoalition.org, port 6667, channel #dw
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Email me at denise@dreamwidth.org, or comment here. We'll see you next week, same bat time, same bat channel.
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Other commitments first! But omg want.
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Alas, right now that is quite literally *nothing*. But I have favorited the room for "when I get some small portion of my brain free from existing obligations!"
I really, really hope y'all stick around for the long haul -- build not only the open beta of Dreamwidth, so to speak, but build the next generation of Dreamwidth coders.
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For now: I'm going to contact my parents on the screenreader thing. My mother uses JAWS and would probably be happy to chip in if she's got time, and also I am so, so thrilled that the first native client is for Mac.
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