Meeting Minutes

Grinnell Plans development meeting 2011/03/13

• Introductions
  • Shitanshu Agarwaal
    • CS senior at Grinnell, not too much web-specific experience
    • CST
  • Ian Young (greenleaf)
    • CS '08
    • worked with PHP for two years, rails for the past couple months
    • PST
  • Anna Carey
    • CS '03
    • worked professionally in rails for three years
    • already kickstarted a rails project for plans
    • EST
  • Jordan Schkolnik
    • CS Dec '10
    • no professional experience, but interested in doing a project until starting full time work
    • CST
  • Ian Lunderskov
    • CS '08
    • hasn't coded recently, but would like to help out occasionally
    • CST
  • Tom Baldwin
    • Physics '08
    • mostly into scientific computing, has coded a bit of web stuff
    • PST
  • Christine Gerpheide
    • Math Dec '08
    • 2yrs PHP/web experience (mostly backend, can do FE stuff too though), very little ruby experience
    • PST, but after tuesday +2 GMT
  • Ian Atha (greekian)
    • CS '08
    • Will mostly be serving an admin/sysadmin role, also fixing bugs
    • PST
• Anna: Motivation to rewrite plans?
  • greenleaf didn't want to maintain the PHP app anymore, bc Ian A and greenleaf were the only ones working on it
  • after using rails for a couple months, feels it would be much easier to maintain and add new features
  • will have some degree of playing around, but has some ideas about how to help move the project
• Anna: not sure if it's worth rewriting it all, because all the code should really just be the core functionality
  • greekian: there are very many layers of code, and esp lately there have been some really weird bugs that are really hard to solve
  • greenleaf made the code more OO recently, which helped a lot, but feels that a rewrite is still the way to go at this point
  • could maintain both for now, using the same DB, slowly adding new features into the new one
  • need to come up with strategies to determine which features the community wants to keep
• greenleaf: there's a fair amount of stuff that's been added just because ppl thought it was cool, but it was unrelated to plans, so yes we'll have to drop some of those and figure out what thecommutiy wants
• greenleaf: rails provides a wonderful structure, and will help new ppl get involved
• greenleaf: prefers that if we run both versions side-by-side, preferably not for a very lon time, so that we aren't restricted too much by the current DB (ie a couple weeks)
  • not hard to port rails to use old DBs
  • Also the DB is not too bad as it is
• shitanshu: yellow tail?
  • a project that got started like 5 yrs ago, but was pretty much abandoned shortly after
• greenleaf: need to keep the scope small, so that we stay focused
• anna: thoughts on stylesheet compatibility issue? how to support "table inside of table" view as opposed to div view?
  • can we just use modern styles now, and drop parchment styles?
  • greenleaf: problem is that there aren't too many new stylesheets yet
  • Christine offers to help with recreating the oldstylesheets
  • tom would like to see how many ppl are using the old/new interfaces, along with which stylesheets they are using
    • ** should send a request to greekian for the specific stats for stylesheets/browsers/etc
  • Should have 2-4 ppl interested in working in CSS to recreate the old CSS, or make new sets
    • Good way to get less-backend ppl involved
    • [kellylor], [baldwint], [rootwile], [erbveron] come to mind
• Anna: HAML? Alternative markup language in ERB, utilizing whitespace and more minimal syntax than HTML
  • possibly a barrier to people that want to break into this
  • greenleaf: personally loves HAML
  • overall sounds like a good idea
• greenleaf: would also like to use SASS/SCSS, which is like augmented CSS - sass-lang.com
  • good sister language to HAML
• shitanshu: how popular are these two projects (HAML/SASS)?
  • the rails community uses them a lot right now, so they probably won't die off any time soon
• Anna: thoughts on division of labor?
  • Anna would like to not touch anything FE
  • Shitanshu agrees, no FE
  • Christine may be interested in adding new features, as opposed to core functionality, bc of little experience with Rails
• Core funcitonality
  • viewing and editing plans, autofinger list
• Anna offers to mentor people a bit in Rails, we can set up a session -** should set up a time with Anna
  • at least Christine and Shitanshu are interested in that
  • 11am Sunday might work for ppl's schedules
• greenleaf: how to get more people involved in developing/catching ?
  • anna: important to have a public invitation, on like the plans frontpage
    • ** anna will draft the message and give it to Ian by tomorrow
  • jordan: really important to reach out to current students as well
  • pair programming would be cool as well
    • could create a list of ppl that are willing to mentor
  • Christine: need to have a specific feature list, so ppl know what they can start working on
    • Anna: need to keep a list of things that ppl are currently doing, and when they finished
    • Shitanshu: could use the tickets in google code
  • greenleaf: so what are the current barriers from ppl joining?
    • anna: documentation is very important, especially to set up in the beginning (packaging issue)
      • greenleaf: so we should create a simple getting-started guide
      • would be good to put info in a README in the main dir
  • christine: public mentor lists should be helpful as well
• anna: thoughts on git?
  • most ppl like it, general consensus is that it's a good way to go
  • github is also really awesome
• anna: who should be commiters?
  • greenleaf: for now, really anyone can probably be a committer
• shitanshu: could also cooperate in the future wit the web app class at Grinnell
• anna: do we need an admin role?
  • Christine offers to do this role
• christine: how can we determine exactly which features to keep?
  • greenleaf: first we need a list of features
    • shitanshu: could add the features we find on github
    • ** should create this list of features, by SUNDAY 3/20
• greenleaf: might be a good idea to keep all "new" stuff on github, old stuff on google code
  • maybe we should keep ticketing on google code
• christine: how to create the task list
  • greenleaf: the task list will probably like "make the models for this" etc
    • anna: most of the models have been sketched in the kickstarted project
  • Ian will make that up
• anna: testing frameworks?
  • shitanshu: ppl should write tests for their own code
  • rails ships with testunit (more business-driven), rspec is also nice (more behavior-driven)
  • [quick discussion] -> we'll use rspec
  • greenleaf: really important to have this all fully tested. shouldn't even accept code without tests in the long term.
• no one in the call is going to use windows for dev (conveniently, for our ruby rails)
• prep for next week
  • shitanshu: recommends the free rails tutorial book -- will send us the link
    • anna also has the pragmatic programmers available, a book on rails
    • shitanshu: important to look into ruby before rails
    • greekian: rails for zombies is also good
    • shitanshu: also a project called ruby-koans (better if you've used ruby a bit first)
  • should keep a lit of good resources somewhere - on github wiki
  • greenleaf: if you want to dive in and start coding, you can also go for that
• ** Anna will include a link to the notes on the main page inside the little blurb
  • this blurb should also say that ppl should join the development mailing list