Tag: ATO2015

GitHub for Beginners

This is the third in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

The second session I attended at the conference was called “How to Start an Open Source Project” and it dealt with the nuts and bolts of GitHub and open source licensing and all those other intimidating things that keep people from starting and contributing to projects. The presenter, Don Schenck from Rackspace, gave a great overview of the process, from getting an idea, naming it, creating the repository (repo) and starting with the first file.

One of the key things he said to us was “once you publish your code to GitHub, it’s not your code anymore,” which is a way of saying that open source projects belong to the community. When starting a project, you need to be starting it with that in mind. If you want to control every aspect of it, then open source may not be right for that project.

He also talked about the need for a development plan: what needs to be done, in what order, and how to get people to contribute.

I’m still not sure I’m ready to create my own project on GitHub, but I’m at least a little more confident that I might contribute to one.

Constraining Design

This is the second in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

The first session I attended at All Things Open was in the UX/UI/Design track. The speaker Shay Howe from Belly described how design constraints can actually free a designer to do what they’re best at. Good constraints include a grid, font/typography choices, color choices, and any existing branding for the site, if it’s available.

“Narrowing your options can clarify challenges,” Howe said, and allow a designer to use fewer resources while maintaining consistent styling across iterations.

As someone who is working on a system to create design as good as my development, this really hit home. It is the reason I always suggest to clients that they should start with a style guide, or even a mood board, to give me constraints to work with. Taking away the basic decisions of font, color, and button styling allows me to spend my limited design resources on interesting elements that really customize a site.

Getting clients to see the importance of these style constraints is also an important part of the process. Clients want to jump right in to seeing a website in progress, and sometimes feel like developing these standards is a waste of time. Done correctly, however, it makes the development process much smoother and faster than the code first method.

“Constraints do not equal sacrifices,” said Howe.

Conference Notes: All Things Open 2015

Last week, I attended my first All Things Open conference. The conference focuses on Open Source software and includes speakers from major industry players like IBM, Microsoft and Red Hat.

This conference was a reach for me. I am not a backend developer and know very little about server-side technology or app development. But it was an important reach for me for a few reasons.

First, working from home means not having people to bounce ideas off of and not having those informal conversations that allow you to get new ideas and see cool things that other people are working on in person. Conferences can fill some of those holes for me.

Second, while contributing to open source software can seem intimidating (WordPress is Open Source), it shouldn’t be. The community is overall supportive of new people joining projects and wants to find new ways to include people who believe in the mission of open source.

Third, and possibly most importantly, spending time with people who are passionate about what they do, whether it’s the same thing I do, or something completely different, is energizing and regenerative. I came home from this conference convinced that I can build that app, finish this project and do something new.

For more on what I learned at the conference, check back in a couple of days.

This is the first in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

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