The workshop on Fedora Hubs at Flock 2017 will be awesome

TL;DR: come to the Hubs workshop at Flock! 🙂

This is a shameless plug, I admit.

In a couple weeks, a fair number of people from the Fedora community will gather near Boston for the annual Flock conference. We’ll be able to update each other and work together face-to-face, which does not happen so often in Free Software.

For some months I’ve been working on the Fedora Hubs project, a web interface to make communication and collaboration easier for Fedora contributors. I really has the potential to change the game for a lot of us who still find some internal processes a bit tedious, and to greatly help new contributors.

The Fedora Hubs page is a personalized user or group page composed of many widgets which can individually inform you, remind you or help you tackle any part of you contributor’s life in the Fedora project. And it updates in realtime.

I’ll be giving a workshop on Wednesday 30th at 2:00PM to introduce developers to Hubs widgets. In half an hour, I’ll show you how to make a basic widget that will be already directly useful to you if you’re a packager. Then you’ll be able to join us in the following hackfest and contribute to Hubs. Maybe you have a great idea of a widget that would simplify your workflow. If so, that will be the perfect time to design and/or write it.

You need to know Python, and be familiar with basic web infrastructure technologies: HTML and CSS, requests and responses, etc. No Javascript knowledge needed at that point, but if you want to make a complex widget you’ll probably need to know how to write some JS (jQuery or React). The Hubs team will be around to help and guide you.

The script of the workshop is here: https://docs.pagure.org/fedora-hubs-widget-workshop/. Feel free to test it out and tell me if something goes wrong in your environment. You can also play with our devel Hubs instance, that will probably give you some ideas for the hackfest.

Remember folks: Hubs is a great tool, it will (hopefully) be central to contributors’ worflows throughout the Fedora project, and it’s the perfect time to design and write the widgets that will be useful for everyone. I hope to see you there! 🙂