
OpenHatch – Find open source projects to contribute to; find mentors - sedeki
http://openhatch.org
======
perlgeek
I'm now signing up there.

It would be really nice to be able to log in with github, since many project
owners already have a github account.

~~~
paulproteus
perlgeek, thanks for signing up!

That's something we just got an email about earlier in the month, though no
one has filed a bug to formally request it yet. I just took a moment to do
that:
[https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue925](https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue925)

If you want to add yourself as "Nosy" then you'll hear about updates to that,
as the community gets moving on in it.

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paulproteus
Yes, we just had some site problems; they seem fixed now, and additionally, I
pushed a front page redesign some contributors had been working on for the
past month! : D

(I'm one of the original people who started OpenHatch and on the board of the
non-profit.) Thanks to sedeki for letting other people know!

~~~
paulproteus
For those interested in the technical details, here are some changes we made
to better-handle the traffic spike:

* Remove some of the MySQL-specific query syntax to make faceted search at openhatch.org/search/ work nicely. A goal of the current implementation is that if you search for "C" you won't find "C++". We implement this by a crazy hack of MySQL REGEX queries, which are (iirc) always unindexed, which is bad news under load. We should probably switch this to client-side faceted search, as here in 2014, it's safe to assume people have Javascript.

* Stop using synchronous requests.get() to fill the cache of blog posts that . The problem here is that if the cache is empty, every web worker will try to fill it. This leads to massive queuing of inbound requests, which is always bad news.

\- Use CloudFlare in front of us, so at least people get reasonable error
messages, and so static resources don't bother our server.

It's still not the speediest site in the world, but it's mostly handling the
traffic, from what I can tell.

I filed these as bugs:

* [https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue927](https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue927)

* [https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue928](https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue928)

If you're interested in helping out, by all means join us. We love new
contributors. Over 26 people contributed to the codebase in 2013, and per
[http://openhatch.readthedocs.org/en/latest/getting_started/i...](http://openhatch.readthedocs.org/en/latest/getting_started/installation.html)
we've tested the dev environment setup process on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and
it should take 10 or fewer minutes.

------
Blahah
This is excellent, particularly the mentoring aspect of it. There is some
really nice work to do in iPython and with Mozilla. Given the heavy Mozilla
involvement I'm surprised they haven't gone with openbadges.

We're working on something similar, but to match developers up with
scientific, conservation and charitable projects that need help. I'm not
interested in hijacking this thread, but if anyone wants to be kept informed,
my email is in my profile.

~~~
paulproteus
Blahah, your [http://solvers.io](http://solvers.io) initiative seems super
cool!

We've found over the years that having one _specific_ task for new
contributors to complete makes a huge difference in attracting that next
contributor. See [http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/second-fedora-
design-...](http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/second-fedora-design-
bounty-ninja-identified/) for a really successful effort along those lines.

If you want to join #openhatch or join
[http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/events/](http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/events/)
and chat with us, we'd be happy to see if there are ways we can both learn
from each other!

~~~
Blahah
Thanks!

We've had similar feedback about specific tasks from the very few people we've
shown the site to so far, and hearing it from you hammers it home.

At the moment we're at the stage of recruiting initial projects. We'd love to
talk to you guys, and will drop along to the IRC room :).

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mburns
Training Missions would be a great use for OpenBadges.

[http://openbadges.org/](http://openbadges.org/)

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chestnut-tree
This is a great initiative. I wish there was a site that could match designers
or UX people with open source projects. I am surprised that something like
this doesn't exist. Are these two camps a little bit weary or suspicious of
each other?

~~~
paulproteus
Hi there! So glad you're excited about that.

We're really excited about that, too, and if you join the IRC channel, we'll
do our best to connect you with a project.

Additionally, I wrote this:

[http://opensource-usability.blogspot.com/2013/12/guest-
post-...](http://opensource-usability.blogspot.com/2013/12/guest-post-
in-2014-lets-make-open.html)

that I would love your thoughts on.

~~~
chestnut-tree
A good article - thanks for the link. I think user testing is an essential
part of making software more usable, but it's not the only aspect of the
design process.

When it comes to UX, I don't believe you can design by committee, but everyone
feels they should have a say in the process (and if you've contributed to the
code of a project, you probably feel an even stronger sense of ownership which
is perfectly natural and understandable). As soon as someone feels their UX
suggestions are ignored, it causes so much resentment. The result is often a
distrustful and even resentful relationship between design and development.
This is such a familiar scenario in the Open Source community particularly for
large Open Source projects.

Here's a small example from the Blender community that illustrates the
difficulty in reconciling different views about UX. It's a Youtube video of a
presentation at the 2013 Blender Conference (Oct 2013) on improving the
Blender UI. In the Q&A after the presentation, one audience member
(rightfully) says we shouldn't treat users as idiots, but then adds that
making Blender easier to use might entail "dumbing down" the app - this
elicits a round of applause from the audience. Dependending on your point of
view, that's a perfectly legitimate concern or a depressing misunderstanding
about ease-of-use:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aIA2LaB2Iw&feature=share&t=3...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aIA2LaB2Iw&feature=share&t=30m19s)

My impression is that there's a fractious relationship between design/UX and
development in the open source community that hasn't changed much over the
years (I'm not pinning the blame on any one camp). How to solve this, I just
don't know. I'm glad that we're having a debate about it and it would be good
to hear more from other developers and designers on this subject.

------
jamesmoss
I had this exact idea 2 years ago, named it (coincidentally) OpenMatch, and
even bought the domain openmat.ch but I didn't have time to work on it.

Really happy to see this come to life, good luck.

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jamhan
Perhaps consider changing that font (Tuffy) to something that renders half-
decently on Windows. It's just an eyesore in Firefox and Chrome. It does look
OK on Linux though.

~~~
paulproteus
If Tuffy doesn't look good on OS X or Windows, then we should look into
switching to something that is readable and nice to look at. Thanks for saying
so!

I filed
[https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue926](https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue926) so
we don't forget to find out more about it.

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f_salmon
Making the world a better place => Awesome people!

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dwaltrip
Saving this to check out later, the idea sounds pretty cool!

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jpatel3
It seems down.

