Chicagoans Hacking on GNOME: May 25th

We'll be having our monthly talks and hackfest on Saturday, May 25th at 12pm at Pumping Station: One (3519 N. Elston in Chicago). William Giokas will be giving a talk on systemd, and George Lesica is tentatively scheduled to talk about R. Mike McCune of the Windy City LUG recently added our group to his Meetup page, so you can RSVP there if you like. Talks are usually ~1 hour each, and we will be around till 5pm-ish hacking on projects. Come by and say hello!

Chicagoans Hacking on GNOME: next meeting March 23rd

We will be having our next Chicago GNOME Hackfest and LUG meeting this Saturday, March 23rd at 12 pm at Pumping Station: One (3519 N. Elston Ave., Chicago, IL 60618). Joel Luellwitz will be giving a talk on Linux utilities, technologies and best practices concerning authentication and security. Sten Turpin will be giving a talk about how he rolls back system changes with yum, LVM and Btrfs. [edit: Sten just sent an email saying he will not be able to come this weekend, so he will be giving this talk at our meeting next month. Joel Luellwitz will be speaking as announced.] Hope to see you there :)

Chicagoans Hacking on GNOME, part 4 (and part 5 preview)

We had our January Chicago GNOME meeting back on January 19th; because I was busy getting ready for the Developer Experience hackfest, I didn't get around to posting about it until now. Better late than never, so here goes:

We started off the meeting with an "Intro to Emacs" talk by Chris Webber. Chris started out with a brief-ish demonstration of Emacs Tetris and Nyan mode (which kept showing up repeatedly after he turned it off). He followed this with an intro to OrgMode, which basically uses a directory-style structure to organize lists. He went on to explain some basic level but pretty interesting stuff, including understanding Emacs keyboard shortcut syntax and terminology.

Part of the intro involved a general discussion about what Chris calls "Fighter Jet" software: applications like Emacs that have a steep learning curve and lend themselves to lots of customization and command-line use. The question he explored then, and that we talked about during the hackfest, is whether or not promoting the use of such software shuts people out of the FOSS community. My opinion is that the community has the obligation to provide some type of support if it promotes the use of this type of software. The question is whether the steep learning curve presents too much of a barrier for new people and therefore shuts them out. I think that learning to use FOSS requires a lot of patience and tolerance for failure. In some ways I think this is worth the trade-off, because I also feel like projects such as GNOME (and many others) are working to make the process of becoming a "power user" more intuitive. I feel that FOSS is like having a free card to a very good library -- having access is only one piece of the literacy puzzle, but it is arguably very important. Having a solid community with resources to teach and support all newcomers hopefully makes the process a little more approachable.

 The text (written in Emacs, of course :) from Chris' talk is available here. It's quite informative, so check it out!

I gave the second talk, covering some of the basic APIs used in GNOME application development. Because we were trying out the idea of having a group project for people who were new to work on, I mainly talked about the structure of Documents, and what is you need to be familiar with for hacking on it: Gkt+, Tracker, GObject Introspection, LibGData, Libzapojit, GOA, etc.

After I finished we moved to the hackfest area. One of the attendees had brought an old Dell computer that wouldn't boot, so a few others helped him to troubleshoot his problem. The feedback we got from attendees was that they generally come so they can set aside time to work on their own projects, so, although people are welcome to come and work on a group project in the future (if you want help getting started, etc), we will generally be continuing to bring our individual projects to hack on.

Our next meeting will be on Saturday, February 16th at 12 pm at Pumping Station: One, 3519 N. Elston Ave, Chicago. Michael Larabel will be giving a talk on Wayland, and I'll give a short update on what happened at the GNOME Developer Experience hackfest. Come hack with us!

Thanks again to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring pizza!

Developer Experience Hackfest

I arrived back in Chicago today after attending the Developer Experience hackfest. While I was there I worked with the developer documentation group. As Allan Day mentioned in his post, he and I drafted some basic tutorial pages and worked with Federico Mena Quintero to make a new outline of the platform overview.

The first tutorial Allan and I worked on outlines the process of creating a GNOME application, and the second introduces new developers to GNOME APIs. Rather than presenting all of the APIs we tried to list what new developers were likely to use, and to list those in according to importance. After the initial drafts of those were finished, Allan worked on editing the API overview while I added some content to the "Writing Your First GNOME Application" page.

While Jakub and Allan worked on making the site responsive, I wrote some new Beginner's Tutorials for JavaScript. The JavaScript beginner pages were lacking eight tutorials that are available in Python and Vala, so I decided to start by writing those. I finished six of the eight, and I will work on getting the other two done, and all of them properly formatted and annotated when we have our next Chicago GNOME hackfest on February 16th.

Our whole group also worked together on the mockups for the GNOME Developer Center. We had several new ideas which I think will really improve the resources for coding, including making all of the API documentation available as a single download (perhaps available in the SDK download). Another idea that I thought was particularly good is adding code search to the online API documentation so developers can easily find existing code in git.gnome.org to use as a reference. The idea here is to possibly use the re2 library, which Google open sourced after it shut down Google Code Search.

Overall I felt that the hackfest was very productive. It was clear that there were a lot of different opinions on various topics, but still there was great focus and a determination to compromise in order to get things done.

Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me and to BetaGroup Coworking for providing the space. It was fantastic to see everyone -- see you all at GUADEC :)

Chicagoans Hacking on GNOME: 4th Meeting on Saturday, January 19th

This is a quick reminder that there will be a GNOME hackfest and Chicago LUG meeting this coming Saturday at PS:One (3519 N. Elston Ave, Chicago) from 12 noon to 5 pm. Chris Webber (who also wrote this awesome blog post you should read) will be doing an Intro to Emacs and I'll be talking about some of the APIs that are commonly used in GNOME applications.

This month we are going to be trying out a new approach to the hackfest portion: if you are looking for a project to work on or want to work with a group, we are going to be building Documents using JHBuild and fixing some bugs. Jim Campbell will be working on documentation for the application. If you want to get a head start by building beforehand, I've written a short wiki with some build instructions. Let me know how it can be improved or if you run into issues. If you have something else you are working on then of course you should bring it and hack with us....this is basically designed to provide some structure for people who want it.

Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for food sponsorship and to PS:One for letting us use the space. See you then!

Chicago GNOME Hackfest #3

Our third GNOME Hackfest in Chicago is scheduled for Saturday, December 15, from 11 am to 3 pm. It will be at Pumping Station: One (3519 N. Elston, Chicago). 

John Lambrechts will be giving a talk on window managers, and Chris Webber is tentatively scheduled to 
give an Intro to Emacs talk. 

I recently added some links for newcomers to our GNOME wiki page, so if this will be your first time 
coming to one of our events, please check out the links beforehand :)

 As Jim mentioned, some of the women involved thought that "GNIGHTS of GNOME" sounded like an event 
for men only, so we are looking for a new name. Any non-gendered suggestions are welcome :) That said, 
our last event was 40% women and hopefully we will be able to encourage even more diversity at our 
future meetings. This is, as always, a woman and LBGTQ friendly event. Hope to see you there, and happy 
hacking!

GNIGHTS of GNOME Hackfest, #2

The second GNIGHTS of GNOME hackfest is happening this coming Saturday, from 11 am to 5 pm at Pumping Station: One (feel free to come for all or stop by -- the schedule is posted HERE (on the "canonical with a lowercase 'c'" Chicago GNU/LUG website)) . Jim Campbell will be giving a talk on DConf and GSettings for Sysadmins, and there will be food and coffee. Come and hack with us if you are in Chicago :) 

Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring snacks, and to PS1 for letting us use their space!