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Tech Team Coordinator

The statements and opinions on this page are solely those of its authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of CouchSurfing International.

THIS PAGE IS OUTDATED

This page refers to some coding that needs to be done on the CouchSurfing website
( or some rules and details about how to write code for the website )

Guidelines for the tech team.

Contents

Priorities of the tech team of CouchSurfing

  1. A usable website (NZC)
  2. To enable meaningful connections made between CouchSurfers
  3. Streamlining developer involvement (NZC)
  4. code cleanup
See also How We Want to Keep CouchSurfing

How new features end up on the site

  • Ask advice from other CouchSurfers - surfing, hosting, groups (Brainstorm and Quality vs. Quantity are major venues for pitching in with any ideas)
  • Minimize confusion among CouchSurfers - communicate with people to know what's going on, keep an eye on Tech News page and New Feature Playground
  • Features should be as simple and intuitive to all nationalities, age ranges, and technical levels as is possible (See also how we want to keep CouchSurfing) - Localization/Globalization group is aimed at providing information about cultural differences, but the other issues have not really been touched upon within the organizational structure.
  • We are currently working on setting up more specific project-oriented teams (such as Meetings upgrade team) to help out with site improvements.

See also

Team

Coordination

The tech team is coordinated by ???, who are at the New Zealand Collective. A coordinator is "someone whose task is to see that work goes harmoniously". The coordinators are striving towards having a group of programmers and other experts working on fixing bugs and new features.

How to become a core developer

  1. Send in a series of good patches
  2. Desire to become a core developer
  3. Agreement among existing core developers

Currently there are 7 somewhat regular "committers" to Subversion: Casey, Joe, Anu and Kristen at the NZ Collective, Kasper (travelling in South-East Asia), Matrixpoint (John) (USA) and Thomas (Belgium)

All other developers have read-only access. They can send "patches" to the committers. If someone's patches regularly end up in the main tree they will become part of the committers group. We'll still keep an eye on the diffs: there is a mailing list just for messages from the svn server. For every commit it will send out a message containing the commentary, the list of changed files and the actual changes. Joe is currently working on a system enabling new developers come on board and commit code directly (it will then be reviewed by the rest of the developers).

More about how it works

We are currently in process of evaluating our working practices and roles as developers. What to keep in mind while coding: respect your fellow surfers and co-volunteers and your contributions will most likely be well-received. If you're not sure about a change you're making, please just ask your fellow developers at the very minimum, and if you are working with anything that has to do with member security, member services, pages with limited access or higher levels of CS organizational structure you should form a connection with the Admins to be able to ask for approval before going forward.

Some more thoughts can be found here:

article history edit