For our main presentation, we have Les Orchard showing us about Web Development and Virtual Machines.
Excerpt
The bar to contribution in Open Source web development projects can be lowered through the use of devops tools and virtual machine technologies.
Description
Open Source projects are most successful when they attract enthusiastic and capable contributors. But, often the first thing a new contributor to a web development project faces is a README file with a long list of instructions needed to even get the thing running.
And that’s if they’re lucky: Just as often, the necessary documentation is incomplete or missing entirely, leaving a new hacker no way to get involved without investing a lot of time up front.
This is no way to treat potential volunteers; they’re doing us favors by spending time with our projects. In return for their time, we should do the best we can to make our projects accessible and rewarding without unreasonable demands.
To that end, we can use modern tools like VirtualBox, Vagrant, and Puppet to turn walls of text into virtual machines. We can offer simple bootstraps and even bootable disk images to can get new developers started quickly, allowing them to explore a running system rather than demand they understand the complete stack before the first page view.
Bio
Les Orchard is a {web,mad,computer} scientist and {tech,scifi} writer from the Detroit, MI area working for the webdev team at the Mozilla Corporation.
Of course we’ll have some of the other great features you’ve come to enjoy at our meetings, including current events and Job/People seekers.
Hope to see you at 6:30pm on Tuesday, November 8th.
We are back at the Farmington Community Library (map)
Unless otherwise noted, we’ll be holding our meetings at the library, in the main auditorium. But, for the October and November 2011 meetings, we’ll be in the smaller meeting room upstairs, near the larger auditorium.