- OpenHatch.org is an open source involvement engine. This is our blog and meta-world.
About OpenHatch
-
RSS Feed
Beginning Pythonistas: present a poster at PyCon 2012!
PyCon is the largest annual gathering for the Python community. It is a diverse conference with content for people of all programming backgrounds, from talks and tutorials to sprints and summits. We’ll be at PyCon 2012, and we hope you’ll join us.
One event we are looking forward to is the poster session. The call for poster proposals ends January 15th, and we want to see more submissions from beginning Pythonistas!
Poster sessions are a low-pressure way to start a discussion or share a project, discovery, or something you’ve learned with PyCon attendees. Are you a new programmer or an experienced programmer who is new to Python? We want to hear from you! To quote the call for proposals:
We’re looking for both experienced conference speakers and people new to technical conferences; industry professionals and hobbyists; entrepreneurs, researchers, and system administrators. You’ve probably learned something that other Python users could benefit from, so come to PyCon and share your story.
If you have something to tell your fellow Python programmers, PyCon 2012 is your chance.
You don’t have to be a professional speaker to give a talk at PyCon. Presenters are volunteers from all walks of life and all levels of experience. From hardcore hackers to educators to hobbyists, anyone with something to say and the desire to say it is welcome.
If you have a topic idea but you’re not sure exactly how to turn it into a killer session, let us know! The program committee is happy to work with you to help your session shine.
Ready to submit a poster proposal? Awesome! Proposals are due by January 15th. To submit one, sign up on the PyCon site and follow the proposal submission instructions.
During the poster session, you’ll stand in front of your poster and use it as a starting-point for conversations with other PyCon attendees. Looking for inspiration on what to talk about? Here are some suggestions:
- Ask a beginner: what are the the hardest parts of learning Python?
- Getting your Python environment set up: a beginner’s perspective
- A survey of Python tutorials
- A survey of Python online learning resources (CodingBat, Khan Academy, learnpython.org, etc.)
- A beginner’s look at writing or packaging your first Python project
- Learning Python, next steps: I went through the python.org tutorial; now what?
- Contributing to an open source project for the first time: a beginner’s perspective
Stripe co-founder @patrickc asks:
How would you answer?
More suggestions? Talk about:
- a cool Python library or API you’ve used.
- how you use Python at work.
- an open source project that uses Python.
- a personal project that uses Python.
Analyse some data in Python–Twitter trends, social graphs, Wikipedia stats, public transportation data, government spending–tell us how you did it and what you learned.
Use a poster proposal as an motivator to learn or do something new:
- Always wanted to contribute to Python? Submit a poster on it and share the process of getting your first patch through.
- Always wanted to make a website or game? Show us some mock-ups and share the development process.
- Always wanted to teach your kid or sibling to program? Submit a poster on it and let us know how it goes.
More sources of inspiration? Check out last year’s posters. Here’s a subset:
- Opening Government With Python
- Education and outreach to non-coders: best practices
- Using a Kinect to improve accessibility
- Running Neutron Scattering Experiments with Python
- Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python
- Python in Atmospheric Sciences
Not sure if you want to present a poster alone? Submit with a friend!
Want someone to bounce ideas off of, or to review a proposal draft? Send mail to hello@openhatch.org. We have experience submitting poster, tutorial, and talk proposals and getting them accepted and would love to help you through the process.
Some important deadlines:
- (1/7) PyCon financial aid applications due
- (1/15) The call for poster proposals ends
- (1/25) Early Bird conference registration rates end
- (1/31) Applications for PyLadies PyCon grants for women due
Submit a PyCon poster proposal today!
Wrapping up the 5th Boston Python Workshop
The 5th Boston Python Workshop ran last weekend at MIT. It was our largest event yet, at 60 attendees and 15 instructors, and had people traveling from as far away as New York to attend. Thank you to all the phenomenal volunteers who helped make this workshop happen.
This workshop was special for a couple of reasons:
- It was the first workshop to utilize our grant from the Python Software Foundation’s Outreach and Education Committee. Thank you to the PSF for supporting us as we continue here in Boston and grow to other cities.
- PyCon donated 2 free registrations to the workshop, which we raffled off to attendees. Our winners were a Harvard librarian excited to start utilizing programming in her job, and a teacher excited to write and explore the pedagogy behind educational computer games. Thank you PyCon for supporting this workshop and crafting a conference that is truly beginner-friendly.
- We found out shortly after this workshop that the talk Asheesh Laroia and I submitted on the Boston Python Workshop and diversity in the Boston Python community was accepted for PyCon 2012! I hope interested readers of this blog who are attending will join us for this discussion on practical programming outreach. If you need help getting to PyCon, the conference has a great financial aid program.
For more details on the 5th Boston Python Workshop, check out:
- photos from this and other workshops
- the workshop wiki
- the event description and reviews
- a great workshop write-up by attendee Trish Fontanilla
This group was really into social media; we had a ton of tweeting, picture posting, and even FourSquare checkins!
I was really impressed to see people from the PSF and PyCon engaging with our attendees on Twitter. During the workshop we talk about “why Python?” and the language’s commitment to community and diversity; the PyCon registration donations and social media engagement were proof of that commitment and an awesome welcome to the community:
Our follow-up project night is January 10th. We run the Boston Python Workshop every 2 months, so see you in February for #6!
Want to see an event like this in your city? Get in touch! Our material is all online and Creative Commons licensed.
-Jessica, for the
Grant to spread the Boston Python Workshop
I’m really excited to report that the Outreach and Education Committee of the Python Software Foundation awarded us a grant to continue our Boston Python Workshop and spread it to three other cities!
OpenHatch 0.11.11 is live
As of yesterday, OpenHatch 0.11.11 is live on the website, and tagged in git. It includes some substantial changes.
This month saw some major overhaul in the backend:
- We stopped using “buildout.” We were using this to help developers install the dependencies required by the app. Now we simply bundle all our pure-Python dependencies using a vendor/ directory (as described in the Kitsune documentation), and the dependencies that are not pure-Python are optional. This means that Windows and Mac OS users can easily get the code and start modifying it and contributing.
- We switched away from the old, slow, unreliable “bugtrackers” framework that we wrote, and toward the newer, Twisted-based “bugimporters” system for downloading bug data. Props to Jack Grigg for building the initial version of this.
- We stopped using the Haystack search system for the /people/ pages, making them much faster. (Full-text search was not appropriate for the kinds of queries we are doing there.) I enjoyed the thrill of deleting hundreds of lines of code from our codebase that interfaced between Haystack and us.
- Jule Slootbeek implemented a much-asked-for interface to interact with prospective helpers on a project and mark them as having been contacted. This feature is not deployed on the live site yet (disabled in settings.py) because we haven’t implemented the final templates for it yet.
Users will notice the site being much faster, and new contributors will notice that getting a development environment working is reliable and speedy (about ten minutes).
You can read the full release plan on the wiki and a list of the bugs we closed.
We had two sprints during this release. The release contains patches from Vivek Shrivastava (based on work by aviendhaSL), Jill A. Johnson, Jason Michalski, Jule Slootbeek, Jessica McKellar, and me (Asheesh Laroia). Of those, this is the first month that Jason, Jule, and Jill have patches that have landed. Welcome aboard!
OpenHatch website changes for the month (and release) of October
Howdy blog readers!
OpenHatch 0.11.10, our release for October 2011, is live on the site. Here is a quick note with the changes from the git tag.
- Deprecated and started removing the old, synchronous, bad bug download code
- Fixed the filenames in the git repository so that it successfully clones on Windows
- Fix some bugs in, and reorganize a bit, the new asynchronous bugimporter code
- Upgraded to Django 1.3
- Fix issue401, so that the nav links have consistent titles
- Fix issue605, so that the single_patch mission explains how to use patch
- Worked on a new front page in front_page_demo branch
- Fix Roundup bug parser so that it accepts bugs from the Python BTS
Thanks to all the people who made this release possible: kabilan, Jack Grigg, Jessica McKellar, Asheesh Laroia, Karen Rustad, and Vivek Shrivastava.
Happy Halloween!
My jack-o-lantern this year might look rather familiar:
Hanna Wallach, an inspiration to OpenHatch
Hanna Wallach has been, and remains, an inspiration to OpenHatch. On Ada Lovelace Day, we pay tribute to the women scientists and engineers who made us who we are.
Hanna is a star computational linguist, currently an assistant professor at UMass Amherst. She has been inspiring people to join free software projects for years. Her outreach work from 2004 to 2007 created institutions that have brought scores of new contributors into free software communities: in that time, she co-founded Debian Women and the GNOME Women’s Summer Outreach Project.
Over the years, Hanna became a celebrity to me.
She was applying computational linguistics just as I was learning it. In 2002, while I was in my first year of studying cognitive science at university, she was porting Dasher to handheld Linux devices.
She was improving Debian just as I considered contributing. In 2004, while I wondered what my first package should be, she had identified cultural problems in Debian that required the creation of Debian Women. Her effort was an immediate success, as you can read in a blog post written by then-teenage Christine Spang:
Two days ago, I was browsing Debian Planet in my RSS aggregator, and stumbled across this entry in Hanna Wallach’s blog. Curiousity piqued, I ventured over to the Debian Women site and browsed around a bit. Not too much later, I checked out #debian-women channel on freenode. A day after that, I am a complete convert (not to mention IRC lurker).
I first had the opportunity to meet Hanna in 2007 when I visited Boston for the GNOME Summit. She and Chris Ball were at a bar named Grendel’s, drinking and chatting. I had just graduated from university studying under Jason Eisner, so I thought I would break the ice by mentioning my advisor. Hanna exploded with energy and told me stories of Jason, in character, asking annoying questions at a linguistics conference. (-:
Hanna has impressed me with her audacity: rather than accept bad culture in open communities like GNOME and Debian, she set out to fix them. She continues to think about gender issues in computer science. Her efforts’ success has meant that now, five years later, Debian Women and GNOME Women’s Outreach continue.
In March 2010, at the Women’s Caucus during the FSF’s LibrePlanet conference, I was lucky enough to catch up with her and explain the OpenHatch project. Today, on behalf of OpenHatch, this post pays tribute to her for her outreach efforts. On a personal level, she is doubly impressive: beyond her outreach efforts in free software, her ongoing academic work in statistical machine learning is a dream I once had (and sometimes still have) for myself.
Image credit: cool sunglasses by-sa Mika.
OpenHatch 0.11.09: Time zones and training missions
During September, we focused on events. We organized a Boston Software Freedom Day celebration and an Open Source Workshop at MIT. This focus on events guided the website changes that shipping during September as the 0.11.09 release.
Training missions changes
Students at the MIT workshop used the OpenHatch training missions. To prepare for that, and in response to bugs that attendees filed, we added some polish to missions. Particularly worth highlighting:
- It’s easier to browse the available missions because of a new visual layout for the missions.
- We also added up-to-date explanatory text to the top of the missions page.
- We organized the missions into groups by kind.
As always, if you have feedback on the training missions, let us know!
Events calendar gets time zone support
In August, we created an events calendar for the site at events.openhatch.org. We didn’t publicize the calendar much because it always showed the date in the one time zone configured on the server.
Clara Raubertas contributed changes to the events calendar that let it check the user’s time zone via JavaScript and show calendar events in that zone.
Who contributed
These are the faces of the people who pushed the code forward this month:
More information about the release
If you’re interested to know more, you can read:
For the future, you might enjoy the 0.11.10 planning page on the wiki!
Image credit: The Time Zone by duncan.
Software Freedom Day in Boston, and beyond
This is just a quick note so everyone knows:
We’re organizing a Software Freedom Day Celebration. The Day is a event celebrated across the globe. It started as an installfest, and we love the enthusiasm behind the event.
We want to know: what are you doing for the day?
I want to give a special thanks to Máirín Duffy for speaking! Her efforts with the Fedora Design Ninjas are a huge inspiration to us, from the way we organized Build It, to the planned Starling bounties, to driving proposed changes to the volunteer opportunity finder.
Here’s our plan:
9/17 OpenHatch hosts Software Freedom DaySoftware Freedom Day is a free-of-cost, community-oriented event being held in Cambridge, Massachusetts at 1000 Massachusetts Ave, from 10am – 5pm on September 17th. The goal of the event is to help people in the Boston area recognize and join existing local free software-related communities. If you’ve been trying to learn more about free software generally, or have been wondering how to build up your free software project, this event is for you!
Máirín Duffy from Red Hat and Fedora is our keynote speaker. Thanks to the Free Software Foundation, Cambridge College and Open Invention Network for their sponsorship!
More details here and sign-up:
http://openhatch.org/wiki/Software_Freedom_Day_2011_Boston
Changes to the OpenHatch website code from July and August: 0.11.07 release notes
I did a lot of traveling during 0.11.07, so that release covers two months: July and August.
The big highlights are the first implementation of the Buildhelper; new contributors fixing template issues; and a project-wide improvement in understanding of how to build reasonable web app front-ends. As usual, there were some code cleanups that make the backend more maintainable. Read the rest of this entry »