Recruiting Developers!

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 01/24/2011 09:50 AM, Tiago Mello wrote:
> Well, I think people show up when they: 1. Use Bugzilla, 2. When they need
> any help on customizations, bug fixes, etc, 3. When they want their customization/bug fixes
> to be in upstream, 4. They have fun when programming in Perl :), 5. etc.

	Yeah, I agree. I think it's possible to go and actively encourage new
people to contribute, though. I've heard of projects doing various forms
of advertising--sometimes people are just looking for a project to hack on.

> So I think the main reason people show up is because Bugzilla does not do what they want, and
> eventually, they starting contributing with things they think are interesting for the community.

	That's been true for most of us, I think, yeah. But I wonder if there
are other people that we could encourage to contribute.

> The 'Make Bugzilla Pretty' initiative I think is an excellent way
> to start.

	Thanks. :-) Hopefully once Bugzilla is pretty we'll have even more
users, too, and then people will want to contribute more. It will
probably also encourage more designers to work on Bugzilla, which would
be good.

> I see people complaining that Bugzilla is written in Perl. There are lot of misunderstanding around there
> about Perl, saying Perl is evil is hard to learn and understand... But it's our obligation to prove the 
> opposite and show Bugzilla as a good example of how Perl can be applied.

	Well, some of that is just a factor of how many people know or learn
Perl. I don't see a lot of new programmers learning Perl these days,
which seems to indicate that as time goes on, the community of available
Perl developers will get smaller and smaller.

	I don't think people learn a new language just to contribute to a
project--although sometimes it does happen. I think people are more
likely to contribute to projects when they already know the language.

> also, since we are a global team, we could organize 
> meetings in our location based on previous meeting contents. 

	That's a good idea. :-) We'd need somebody to coordinate that, though,
and help people set up meetings in their local areas.

> Also, every location has at least one open source
> conference and we should submit papers for them to take advantage of the meeting and show Bugzilla. We could
> talk about cases of success of Bugzilla, how to customize Bugzilla using extensions, how fun is to contribute!

	These are great ideas. I'm not personally near enough to most
conventions to contribute, but anybody who's near a convention is
welcome to submit a paper to talk about Bugzilla, and I'd be happy to
give tips about what you can talk about.

> I can help, but I don't think it should be one person only, but a team.

	Okay. Would you like to be in charge of forming a team? :-)

	-Max
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