On 26th I finished the semester exams and the day afterwards went on a trip.

It kicked off with me getting around Brussels with guidance from my printscreened map mashups – looking forward to being able to use Amisha’s Print Support in GNOME Maps in the future for this as I have no internet on my phone. :)

Wednesday was spent at the developer experience hackfest, discussing the future of GNOME Developer Center with kat, lasse, afranke, matthieu and fredp. Matthieu demoed his tool hotdoc and ptomato showed off his efforts on getting GJS documentation online. My understanding of where we ended was that there was some consensus so far to try to unify the hand-written docs so they are written in a single language (fx Mallard) and make it play with hotdoc which can integrate that with source code documentation. Hotdoc also allows a lot of cool things such as being able to change the language of the code examples and online editing.

I spent another part of the hackfest on creating CSS style that can make it easier to use our TemplateFancy for applications which want to be newcomer friendly. I partly achieved to create a navigation bar – I’m having some issues finding a non-hacky way of center-aligning the li elements relative to the width of the ul elements though, so I left that effort aside after a while. Beyond that, what remains now is to create CSS classes for title, subtitle and frontpage content.

my small laptop in a large room with a dozen hackers. The location was provided by betacowork – they are awesome.

The rest of my productive time went into iterating on some designs for planned features of Polari:

• IRC commands auto-completion
• Undoing connection removal (landed)
• NickServ handling
• Improvements for changing nicks (landed)
• Contextual Popovers

Snippets of small UI mocks I’ve been working on (some of it is still WIP).

Then FOSDEM happened. Also this year did GNOME have a booth although not as big as in previous years. I had designed merchandise and kat printed it – we had hoodies, t-shirts, mugs, stickers and a demo computer with the latest stable version of GNOME.



I watched Christian Hergert’s demo of Builder which was quite insightful and something I can recommend you watch when a video appears online. Beyond that I was mainly standing in the booth, selling wear and talking to GNOME users. Some visitors asked how we (the people in the booth) were involved with the project. Some were even interested in contributing, so I showed them our newcomers page. When they appear on IRC, make sure to show them we don’t bite (most of the time)!

31st January is today and that marks the end of the vacation. Last semester of my bachelor degree starts tomorrow, exciting times ahead.

Today we were relocated to a bigger space and are now co-located with libreoffice developers’ hackfest.

Although not intended, the day mainly ended up landing my status-hiding branch in Polari with help from Florian. The code behind the logic became fairly complex and tangled. To make the code easier to read we expanded chatView’s convenience functions and restructured it to minimize code duplication. Now the two commits has landed in master so we can start iterating on the behavior. One of the plans is for example to be clever about status emission based on frequent or recent people that you have talked to.

There is also some polish that could be cool to land:

• Using collapse/expand arrows instead of ellipsis
• Change the color of a status header on hover to indicate its clickableness
• better visually indicate the relationship between statusheader and its status messages.
• Handle various special cases (fx the same user joining/leaving several times)

..I think some of those could definitely make good newcomer bugs. (:

Thanks to GNOME I’m attending the content apps hackfest. Today started with some introductionary some discussion on the individual applications, Documents, Books, Videos, Photos and Music. GNOME contributors also attended through hangouts and we managed to cover quite some ground in terms of what the content apps needs and their scope. We are around 13 in total sitting at Medialab, typing away on the keyboards now.

One of the bullets this hackfest is about which I am particularly interested in is how we attract more contributors to the content apps. IMO first step is to make it easy for new developers to start contributing. So I spent the afternoon revamping GNOME Documents’ wiki app page. Photos and Music are also listed as newcomer-friendly apps and would likely need a similar makeover.

For tomorrow I want to start looking into what newcomer bugs are filed against the content apps and possibly file more primarily, though.

Outside of the hackfest I have also worked a bit Polari. In the airport I sat down to revamp my status hiding branch which is almost fully working. I was also super pleased to hear that Carlos Garnacho had worked on a tracker miner for Polari’s chat logs which means we hopefully can implement some much-needed search history functionality.

Hugs to GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my trip to here!

Me, Carlos and others has been working on improving the newcomer experience. GNOME is a 15 years old project. Our community conventions and infrastructure which newcomers have to learn all bear signs of this. Over time such project in the size of GNOME build up vast amount of information, historial baggage and complex navigation structure. To me this is all a natural healthy sign of a large project swiftly advancing the Linux desktop.

However, this creates a high barrier of entry for outsiders and ultimately new contributors are necessary to keep GNOME sustainable. The newcomer experience effort aims to simplify the complex navigation, concentrate the information and remove historical baggage. Ideally this effort should spread to every type of contributor, but for now I am focusing on developers.

Introducing Newcomers Guide

In the spirit of simplification, the GNOME Love effort have been renamed to the Newcomers effort. The effort does what it says on the tin. All documentation has been moved from /GnomeLove/ to /Newcomers/ on the GNOME wiki and the IRC channel for newcomers is #newcomers. It is also planned that the “gnome-love” tag should change “newcomers”.

Furthermore the GnomeLove documentation has been restructured. Getting started contributing has been divided into 4 steps: Choose a project, Build the project, Solve a task, Send a patch. The simplicity here is very necessary. Human attention space is small and simplicity makes a large project like GNOME less intimidating.

The first step, Choose a project is a revamped page of the previous project/mentor list. This section presents a small list of projects that newcomers can get involved with. It is important to realize that not all GNOME projects are newcomer-friendly, which is very natural. Ideally a project should only be listed here if it is actively maintained. Concretely by “actively maintained” I mean:

• The project has at least one mentor who help newcomers in #newcomers and the project chatroom.
• The project’s wiki page is welcoming and presents the information you need.
• The project’s bug tracker contains newcomer bugs, so newcomers can find tasks easily.
• The project can is easily buildable.

Currently the section lists 10 projects. The plan is to review the infrastructure of each of these projects and ensure the list is kept concise.

After choosing the page, the newcomers are led onto the second step: Building the project. This is our newcomer JHbuild guide. Then the third Step, Solve a task, is a completely new page aiming to describe a general workflow when solving bugs in a GNOME project. The page also introduces the developer tools we use in GNOME.

Finally the 4th step, Submit the patch, introduces GNOME’s use of Git and how to submit patches to a bug on GNOME’s bugzilla.

What’s up next

With the 4 described steps above, the core of /Newcomers/ is now in place for the new developer experience. The plan is to actively maintain this core and continue to concentrate its contents.

The next immediate step is to look at external links which the Newcomers guide link to. GNOME Developer Center in particular needs a serious refresh. For now, instead of designing the ideal, I started making practical mockups for revamping GNOME Developer Center, reusing as much existing infrastructure as much as possible.

This seemed plausible to me, but they might not be as easily achievable as I hoped. However Frederic Peters is looking into making library-web which GNOME Developer Center is generated from, Django based.

Another item on my wishlist is the ability to build and develop applications without all the dependency mess. Most newcomers get stuck at step 2, Build the project. My own hope is that XDG-app, an SDK and Builder can help us on the way here. It would also be great if we could spread the effort to cover Documentation, Design, etc but for now I’ll be focusing my own efforts into the developer experience.

Feel free to join the efforts, fx by coordinating with me or csoriano at #newcomers. There’s always newcomers visiting and there’s plenty of external documentation we need to revise. By participating you’re ensuring GNOME’s future.

GUADEC 2015 was a lot of fun, from preparation till the conference happening. I gave a lightning talk on my work on Polari, a talk on GNOME’s release videos and a talk at FOSSGBG on my experience getting started in GNOME.

Behind the Release Videos. Picture by Garrett LeSage (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

I felt joy meeting everyone at the conference, at the picnic, at swedish local restaurants, and at the GNOME games. It was also great to meet with Florian and get some code landed in Polari (more on that soon).

Felix is landing some code. (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Hugs to Andreas and Fabiana for letting me stay at their place and for being the initiative to make GUADEC happen in Gothenburg. The conference has ignited an even bigger fire in me for contributing to GNOME.