Developer Experience Hackfest, 2016

betacowork, Brussels, Belgium, 27–29 January 2016

Primary contact: PhilipWithnall <philip tecnocode co.uk>
Secondary contact: FredericPeters

Relevant GNOME team

GTK+, GLib, developer documentation developers

Description

As is now traditional, the 2016 DX hackfest aims to push forward roadmaps for the toolkit and developer experience. This year’s event will be next to FOSDEM, to allow for the two to be combined for transport.

Remote participation

People will be jumping in and out of #dev-x on irc.gnome.org.

Each big discussion should have someone running jitsi on their laptop throughout, so that specific remote participants can join in. Please let us know if you want to be involved in a specific discussion (and put that on the agenda)! https://meet.jit.si/DevX

Goals

As with last year’s event, all aspects of the GNOME application developer experience are in scope, including:

• xdg-app
• Builder
• gir → documentation
• Build system simplification
• UX of sandboxed apps

• Developer tools design (Builder, gitg, DevHelp, Glade)

• developer.gnome.org design
• Improving newcomer experience
• Human Interface Guidelines
• New GTK widgets (combobox replacements, new tab widget, for example) and application templates, especially that affects user experience
• GJS roadmap and missing bits
• App store/distribution model for bundles
• Global search performance and API

The central aim of this hackfest is to agree on an actionable plan for the next year for each area of the developer experience, including a GTK+ roadmap, a continued plan for Builder, and continued improvement of the GIR infrastructure and tooling.

Schedule

People are free to arrive earlier or leave later, and spend time around town hacking on things, though we may not have access to betacowork before the 27th. A tentative schedule:

• 27th: xdg-app and Builder
• 28th: New GTK+ widgets
• 29th: System integration: GJS, globalsearch; documentation: HIG, developer.gnome.org

• 30th: FOSDEM

• 31st: FOSDEM

Agenda

Specific items to address during the hackfest (feel free to add to the list), which should be taken as a measure of success:

• Documentation browser for docs generated from GIR, especially for GJS

  • Proof of concept here, can we host this on Gnome infrastructure?

  • Mathieu Duponchelle's tool "hotdoc"
  • Long prose sections that are only in gtk-doc
  • Translating code examples
  • JS/Python overrides documentation

  • DEMO Thu 28th - 3:00PM.

  • Links from the Jitsi session:

    • DevDocs instance - http://ec2-52-32-237-163.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:9292/

    • gobject-introspection branch - https://github.com/ptomato/gobject-introspection/commits/wip/ptomato/devdocs

    • devdocs branch - https://github.com/ptomato/devdocs/commits/gir-redux

    • How I configured the server - https://gist.github.com/ptomato/f778f55c92ff52590c92

    • Vala - http://valadoc.org/#!wiki=index

    • Python - http://lazka.github.io/pgi-docs/index.html

• GJS platform improvements
  • Porting to mozjs31 internally?

  • Promises implementation WIP here until we have mozjs31

  • JS objects as GObject properties, like we have in PyGObject
• Builder and L10N

  • https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder/Planning/L10nI18n

  • I might try to write a plug-in doing that, to learn Builder
• Zanata integration into GNOME tools
  • I'm actually not sure if Zanata is useful for GNOME, but it has some interesting features, such as fetching translation suggestions from server

  • https://github.com/ueno/zanata-glib (WIP)

Attendees

Remote participants

Current sponsors

• Betacowork Coworking Brussels (meeting space)

• ICAB Business & Technology Incubator (meeting space)

• Collabora (food and snacks)

Venue

Betacowork office, Brussels, Belgium: http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/32352517

• Betacowork Coworking Brussels
  ICAB Business & Technology Incubator
  Witte Patersstraat 4 rue de Pères Blancs
  1040 Brussel-Bruxelles (Etterbeek)

How to get there

By plane

From Brussels International Airport:

• Take bus 21 (towards Luxembourg) for 17 stops, to Diamant
• Take tram 25 (towards Boondael Gare) for 4 stops, to Petillon
• Cross over the main road and continue walking in the same direction as the tram; take the third left onto Rue des Pères Blancs
• ICAB and betacowork are in the second building on your right, after Commerzbank

By train

From Brussels-Midi/Zuid:

• Take IC3607 (towards Landen) for 1 stop, to Brussels Centraal station
• Take metro 5 (towards Herrmann-Debroux) for 7 stops, to Petillon
• Exit the metro station southwards onto Vrijwilligerslaan and turn right onto it
• Take the third right onto Rue des Pères Blancs
• ICAB and betacowork are the third building on your left

How to leave

FOSDEM will be taking place on 2016-01-30 and 2016-01-31 in the same location.

Accommodation and food

Collabora are sponsoring snacks and some food for the hackfest.

We are renting an apartment between January the 27th and January the 31st.

• Apartment 1

FOSDEM has a page of accommodation suggestions

Note that due to FOSDEM being immediately after the hackfest, accommodation will probably fill up quickly, so arrange something early.

Nearby Hacker-Friendly Cafés and Pubs

TBC — suggestions welcome!

Reports

Here we will link all the blog posts published during or after the hackfest, including information about the work done. If tweeting about the hackfest, please use the hashtag #dxhackfest2016. Please also thank betacowork and ICAB for generously sponsoring the event.

• xdg-app at the Developer Experience Hackfest by Alexsander Larsson

• Project Templates by Christian Hergert

• Instrumenting the GLib main loop with Dunfell by Philip Withnall

• Developer Experience Hackfest 2016 by Cosimo Cecchi

• Crack from the Gnome hackfest by Alexsander Larsson

• GNOME Developer Experience hackfest: xdg-app + Debian by Simon McVittie

• DX hackfest 2016 aftermath by Philip Withnall

• Belgian Vacation by Bastian Ilso Hougaard

• DX Hackfest & FOSDEM by Tristan Van Berkom

• Developer Experience Hackfest by Lasse Schuirmann

• FOSDEM & Dev-x hackfest 2016 by Zeeshan Ali

• Developer Experience Hackfest 2016 by Juan Pablo Ugarte

• DX Hackfest day 1, day 2 and day 3 by Alexandre Franke

Questions & Comments

None so far.