Community Weeks: Development – our mentor for newcomers

Last week we looked at the documentation team’s role in the LibreOffice project, and this week we move on to development. As you’d expect, the development team is responsible for updating and maintaining LibreOffice’s source code – adding new features, fixing bugs, and making sure that the suite builds correctly across various operating systems.

Development may seem like the most daunting sub-project in LibreOffice, but there are many ways to get involved, even for less-experienced programmers or those with just a couple of spare hours every week. We have “Easy Hacks” to get new contributors on board (more on those later in the week), and we have a dedicated mentor who helps first-time developers explore the source code, build it, and create their first patches.

His name is Jan Iversen, and we asked him about his role and how he helps newcomers…

What is your role in the development team?

My role is to mentor new contributors, and in general help the development community grow. I often act as a intermediary between new people and core developers, to save time for the core developers. To help the community I am also a “part-time” release engineer and I help the infrastructure team as well.

What does your typical workday look like?

I start every morning by looking at new patches in Gerrit from new contributors, comment on them and if they look good, assign a core developer to make the review. I also control the state of bugs.documentfoundation.org with regards to our Easy Hacks, control new ones, and check comments on existing ones.

On average there are 5-10 mails in my inbox, mostly from contributors but also more and more from the rest of the community.

The rest of my workday goes with the bigger tasks, like:

• Rewriting big parts of the development wiki
• Being available on IRC (I am there 24/7 as @janIV – or more correctly, messages are stored when I sleep
• Rewriting our Easy Hacks to make them more understandable

As I live in Spain, I also work to get the Spanish community up and running.

How many developers are active in a typical week?

We have a nice page of stats for that.

In a typical day, I guess there are about 20 different people active on IRC and 5 on email. We are about 10 people who, as a person told me, have a IRC client seemingly built-in to their brains! And the others are people popping in for a question.

It is very clear that IRC is for the more hard-core developers. New people especially use social media a lot more, so I am working on getting social media interconnected with IRC.

What’s the biggest success so far, and the biggest challenge?

My biggest success was Google Summer of Code (GSoC), where our community managed to get the largest number of applicants to date. Google sadly enough only awarded us 12 seats, so we had to select the projects carefully.

My biggest challenge, is and will be for some time, to change the way we communicate, to a style more acceptable for especially students. This must be done as a evolution, not a revolution, in order not to break the existing community.

What sort of help are you looking for?

LibreOffice is very much C++, so people who know C++ and want to learn how to work with a big project are very much sought after.

But in reality, we have Easy Hacks for a lot of programming languages, so everybody is welcome. One of the people I mentored started by telling me that he was a newbie in programming. It made me very happy when he lately was given committer status, so people tend to grow with the community.

Local community building is my theme for 2017: having small groups of developers that help each other is something I would like to see, and then we will help such groups, by having mentors ready to help them. Also, I have – among others – created a step-by-step guide explaining how to get from you first contact with the community to have successfully submitted your first patch: see this page.

Thanks Jan. Later in the week we’ll look at some stats from the development team, see what tools are used, and show you how to get involved. You could even be awarded a shiny certificate like the one below when your first code patch is accepted…