[OSDC Israel] OSDC::Israel::2007 Milestones

[Steph Fox]

This is a good idea, but not a crowd-puller.

I did something similar - less involved, more of a 'come and join us' 
thing - at the PHP International conference a few years back. Admittedly I 
was 'rasmussed' (a PHP community verb meaning 'someone higher up in the 
pecking order was speaking in the next room at the time so nobody came to my 
talk') but even so I ended up with a grand total of 7 people. I dropped the 
idea of using a whiteboard and took them all to the bar area where we drank 
coffee around a big table instead. A couple of the core developers came and 
joined in the resulting round-table Q and A session, ie there were three of 
us prepared to mentor anyone interesting in coming into our own area of 
development. At the end of the session we had five people saying they would 
take it further - mostly in the context of the PHP manual - but as far as 
I'm aware none of them actually did.

I don't know how much interest there would be in a session about learning 
your way around the tools of the trade, although a couple of the guys have 
given quite successful talks about extension writing more recently. PHP both 
glories in and suffers from a low entry level; 'my' attendees were 
intimidated by words like 'XML', 'CVS', 'autoconf'... and the fact that 
doing anything useful, for php.net at least, means learning C.

BTW if you're looking for any PHP 'big names' you still have Zeev Suraski in 
Israel most of the time (he'll probably kill me for mentioning though!) 
Rasmus made Personal Home Pages; Zeev and Andi Gutmans were responsible for 
writing the scripting engine that drove (and continues to drive) PHP: 
Hypertext Processor.

- Steph


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Amir E. Aharoni" <amir.aharoni at gmail.com>
To: "Open Source Developers' Conference - Israel - Discussion list" 
<osdc-discuss at osdc.org.il>
Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 1:11 PM
Subject: Re: [OSDC Israel] OSDC::Israel::2007 Milestones


>> I ask because nearly every programming language today is available in
>> an open-source version (for example GNU's C++ and Java), but we
>> wouldn't generally expect those languages at an open source
>> conference.
>
> This is not really a reply, but a thought:
>
> A lot of people talk about using free software, but how many are
> actually coding it?
>
> Obviously, *joining* a free software project as a coder is the
> greatest contribution to the community, but the act of joining seems
> quite steep for many who want to help (me, for example).
>
> My proposal: Organize workshops that show people how they can set up
> on their computers a development environment for an open source
> project. For example:
>
> * How to start writing a Firefox extension - what tools to install,
> how to debug, how to test on different platforms, how to publish it,
> etc.
> * How to set up an environment to build Firefox if i want to fix bugs
> in the main application (Gecko, Fx GUI, XPCOM, etc.... i know the
> buzzwords, but not much more than that)
> * How to write an Eclipse plugin
> * How to write a Perl module that will be good enough for CPAN
>
> I'm talking about a detailed workshop, that shows everything:
> * Checking that you have the right compiler and installing one, if you 
> don't
> * The same for debugger, profiler, etc.
> * Setting up version control system - every major project has its own
> conventions for those
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