One way to find out what’s happening in Drupal

Roy — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 09:09:57 +0000

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Many channels, but the weekly meetings some teams have are a great way to get started.

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It’s a big project, Drupal is. Many different areas that people are working in. The project is it’s own stack of technologies and skills, from low level framework considerations to the last bit of people-facing interface. Composer, Documentation, Accessibility. Each layer in the stack comes with shared considerations about goals, priorities, standards, documentation and getting code written, reviewed, committed.

There are whole teams working on specific feature sets. Media, Workflow, Migrate. But how to find out what’s happening inside each of these areas? PHPUnit, Out of the Box, API-first.

These links all go to long, dense outlines of plans and issues where current state of things and what to work on next is not super obvious. But there is a predictable and reliable way to see and hear people discuss their projects and initiatives. Outside-In, Admin Information Architecture, Progressive Web Apps. Many of the larger initiatives have weekly meetings to discuss progress, status and next steps. Mentoring, Multilingual, Diversity.

Here’s a calendar with all the core meetings on it.

Where and how these meetings are held differs per team. IRC, Google Hangouts, Slack. Many interesting channels on Slack lately, check those out.

These meetings are an easy way to start listening in and getting up to speed. The timing is predictable and you can be sure it’s the experts talking about what is happening and important now. Layout, Security, Frontend components. Don’t let that hold you back to ask questions or share your thoughts. They are nice people and always looking for more people to help out. You are welcome.

UX meeting format is evolving

Roy — Mon, 30 May 2016 22:53:56 +0000

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50/50 on new ideas and reviewing work in progress

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After a couple of weeks of setting up with mostly free-format meetings in IRC we’re going to try a more structured format for our weekly UX meetings:

First half hour: people can introduce a problem + proposed (possible) solution
Second half hour: we review any work that has progressed over the past week. Often a core committer will be around to provide guidance or even actually commit changes that are good to go.

We did a first ad-hoc version of this last week, including a hangout with screen sharing. It worked really well, was productive and a lot of fun. Seeing the same thing in action is helpful when discussing user interface changes!

Next one is coming up and people from Acromedia will present on a topic and outline their proposed solution. For the second part I’m hoping we can review the “Place block” experimental module patch.

The meeting will take an hour. Here’s a calendar for the date and time.

Want to join? Join the UX channel on drupal.slack.com. Get an automatic invite here. We’ll link a hangout from there and make sure we’re broadcasting live so at least everybody who wants can follow along and use Slack for background chat.

See you there!