Public Lab Research note


Web Working Group Update 13: December

by warren | January 05, 2017 22:33 05 Jan 22:33 | #13841 | #13841

We've had a great month of December in the Public Lab software community:

Excluding merges, 19 authors have pushed 58 commits to master and 68 commits to all branches. On master, 105 files have changed and there have been 2,087 additions and 780 deletions.

(via GitHub Pulse)

A lot happened over the year-end holidays, and I'm especially grateful to @ananyo2012, who's been leading our Google Code-In program these past weeks, and putting in long hours to get high-schoolers involved in open source coding by contributing to our website! It's been a big boost to our #software-outreach efforts!

Above, you can see one thing I did over the holidays, which was to try to write documentation for how our database is organized, thanks to a request from one of our new contributors, `@pyluftig`. You can read these docs here: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/master/doc/DATA_MODEL.md

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One thing that's especially nice is that we've been solving issues faster than new ones have been being made -- so the total count is now down to 160! This is in part due to our #first-timers-only outreach, as we've seen first-timers-only issues being picked up faster and faster. This week, one was claimed within seven minutes of being posted! If you're a first-time coder, you can join in here on our new "Welcome page":image description

Big code updates and "breaking it up"

One thing I'm particularly proud of is our community's work on the Wiki Locking mini-project, which was a complex set of changes which were solved almost entirely in the past month, by a team of people collaborating: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/397

This will keep spam off our most-trafficked pages (read how it works here), and was made possible by one of our new strategies: breaking up complex problems into smaller, self-contained, and easily testable parts.

Using this strategy, we're also making some great progress on a bigger project, which adds geographic organizing features to the site -- however, it's somewhat sprawling, so it was a good candidate for our new "break it up" approach, and it's making steady progress as well:

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https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/1070

So far it's pretty preliminary, but it's coming along:

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How we made this our best Google Summer of Code ever

I wrote a blog post after this past summer about how we were able to make this our best year ever for Google Summer of Code -- it covers a lot of the specific strategies in our #software-outreach, but with more of a focus on the specifics of Git collaboration -- aimed at other GSoC program participants. Check it out!

This was our fourth year doing Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and it was our best year ever by a wide margin! We had five hard-working students who contributed over 17,000 new lines of (very useful) code to our high-priority projects.

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2016/12/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up_21.html

Rich Editor launched

Finally, the Rich Editor is now the default editor -- try it out today!

That's about it -- thanks, all!


2 Comments

This is a great report, thanks for posting!

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Thanks Jeff for the appreciation! I am also overwhelmed to see the number of contributors in our codebase and it keeps growing!

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