2017-03-11 Meeting notes

Date

11 Mar 2017

Attendees

Nick Sellen
Matthias Larisch
Raphael Wintrich
Tilmann (partial)

What people said

Raw notes are at https://pad.riseup.net/p/foodsharing-dev below is a summary.

General

Raphi has a lot of time in the next 6 months to work on it. He is not yet connected to the workflow we have defined in the past few months. It's important to define how to work together effectively.

The most important three aspects for Raphi are:

making the project open source
providing an easy pathway for developers to join project
do a proper security audit/fix
make the frontend nice and modern

Backend framework

We discussed which framework for the backend to use out of symfony components, phalcon, or no framework (the status quo).

At the Berlin hackathon last year we (Matthias, Nick, and Adrean) looked into symfony components and it seemed a promising approach. Some initial work was done in a branch to explore this option. It has a nice incremental approach.

Raphi has been using phalcon already and so this would enable faster development speed. He does not have experience with symfony yet.

Nick thinks symfony is more widespread and that is important for developer adoption after Raphi's 6 months is over and his contributions will reduce.

Outcome: will focus on frontend first, will look into symfony

Frontend framework

There was/is some carrot campaign thing and for that dominik was reworking the home page. The status of the carrot campaign thing is uncertain right now. His homepage concept is viewable at https://invis.io/PBANX5TT9.

Raphi would like a clear frontend framework but it's a big complicated topic as there are so many, and it's quite overwhelming. Would like to not have to rework everything. Thinks to use existing combination of jQuery and bootstrap.

Nick experimented a bit with vue.js already in a branch and seemed good. Main goal is being able to unit test frontend. Tricky aspect is getting a good UI library that works well with a good framework. Normally needs an intermediate project that combines the two (e.g. vue + bootstrap = vuestrap, or angular + bootstrap = angularstrap, etc). A lot of churn here, not much stable and long term supported.

Outcome: nick to go through vue.js with Raphi to see if he likes it.

Gitlab vs Github, personal repo vs org repo

Prototypefund requires code to be in personal repo on github. Raphi would like to incrementally security check code and add it to this repo. Nick points out we would loose the git history this way and would end up with a codebase very divergent to the live one and this would be difficult to switch over reliably, prefers incremental approach and keeping git history. Already have CI/test/etc setup in gitlab. Matthias finds gitlab a bit buggy, so would be happy with github. Everyone is happy with github.

Outcome: Raphi will work for the next month in his personal repo, and after that discuss with prototypefund if we can use org account (or gitlab), and we will see how to merge his work into the main git repo. If we move to github, Nick is happy to setup CI there.

Relationship to yunity

Raphi would like it clear how foodsharing.de relates to yunity, most people who want to contribute to foodsharing don't know what yunity is, and it's confusing. Nick and Matthias explain that a developer community has built up in yunity (that work on foodsharing and new foodsaving tool) that would outlive yunity, and also other support is available (e.g. translation team). Raphi happy to wait and see. Nick agrees it is confusing for people to have to try and understand what yunity is.

Outcome: try and clarify relationship, wait to see how yunity progresses/redefines

Developer website

Raphi is not experienced with jekyll and thinks to create a wordpress site as it is quicker than learning jekyll. Raphi could also make html/css and Nick is happy to put that into a jekyll template. Matthias points out learning jekyll is not much more than html/css anyway.

Outcome: raphi would concentrate on landing page first, then see about making it into a jekyll template

Mobile app

Matthias points out to support a proper mobile app would need to make lots of backend changes (to create API) and it's quite a big project to work on a big mobile app concept. Raphi points out part of his plan is to have a stable API ready by the end of the 6 months anyway. Matthias wonders about data protection, reassured that API would be created from fresh and only share the minimum data needed. Raphi agrees that API would have nice swagger UI.

Outcome: no effort on mobile app, but API would proceed

More official rights/responsibilities

The question was triggered by Raphi rejoining project and it opened up the question of who is allowed to do what anyway, who has what power etc.

Outcome: no need to define this now, maybe revisit in a few months

Buddy system

Nick explains buddy system is borrowed from loomio/enspiral steward system. Main aim to help contributors form clear tasks and to support existing and new people. Raphi and Matthias like concept. Raphi says we could explain it on the new developer website.

Outcome: start buddy system soon, include some content about it on the new developer website

Deployment

Matthias is currently dissatified with deployment system, sometimes there are some changes only on live server (due to urgency). He is the only person able to do this right now. An autodeployed staging site with nice fake data would be great. Along with having a more general way to generate good fake data. A live staging site would serve as a prototype system for making the production deployment better too. Current fake data is either added via SQL or via codeception helpers. Solution really requires ORM to be used first, then there are lots of good libraries available. @zner01 was offering to work on ORM, and Matthias trusts his skills and ability to ask questions when needed.

Outcome: try to engage @zner01 to work on ORM, then integrate good fake data library

How to get more contributors?

Nick points out the rails girls summer of code seems to be good at getting people engaged with the foodsaving tool. Matthias thinks we need more processes in place before we can open up like that. Need really skilled developers right now. Raphi wants to focus on getting people after the 6 months is done. Nick offers to talk at Berlin meetups in April to get new people.

Outcome: do nothing specific for now, focus on getting ready for when 6 months is over

General talk

Raphi is much clearer now, nice to reconnect with people. Talk about organising a hackathon in Berlin in April. Raphi might have access to space connected to prototypefund.

Outcome: he will contact them to ask