[Gsoc] Re: introductions, please

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey Uli,

Thank you very much for the nice introduction! Nice compliments, um,
thanks, you make me blush. :)

Some comments:

On 5/9/07, Uli Fouquet <uli at gnufix.de> wrote:
[I urge people to make noise]
> I see the point. However, even in open source communities too much noise
> can be a problem too.

Good point, though not a problem in the Zope community at present for
the most part.

[snip]
> The problem with making-noise for non-gurus is, that there are many
> excellent brains out on the lists, so I generally prefer to listen
> instead of telling others what to do, simply, because others can do
> better.

I have this theory about creativity, in this case, saying useful
things or creating useful code. It's often not that the people doing
it are so much better than everybody else at it. It's just they
create/speak more frequently. This gives them good practice, and by
pure chance they'll have a higher chance of a hit than someone who
does it less frequently. The same approach works for humor, actually -
if you make 1 joke it'll fall flat, but if you make a 100 and 10 hit
the spot, people will appreciate the other 90 more as well, as they're
already in a mood to laugh.

That's not to claim this theory accounts for all cases of creativity,
so if you poke holes in it I'll happily let the water flow out.

[snip]
> I would like to introduce the project in technical
> terms deeper around the 28th of May and then, indeed, also on the zope3
> list.

and/or the grok-dev list.

> As some of you might have heard, my project is 'the other' grok project,
> targetting the implementation of an interface for grok. 'Interface'
> means an administration UI for installing and other most important
> administrative things you can do with zope3 components/applications.

Note that I think this 'other' grok project is very important. A good
admin UI can help us in many ways, bringing back some the benefits
that the Zope 2 ZMI brought us:

* give people a good first impression .There's something they can
click on that they can *see* when they install Grok.

* a helpful tool introspecting APIs and so on. I hope we can take the
best from apidoc and think things through a bit more to make this a
tool people use all the time to discover APIs.

* a helpful inspection/debugging tool. Investigate an application from
the inside.

* an easy way to install and manage Grok applications.

The most important thing of the ZMI that's explicitly out of scope is
programmability.

Since the admin UI is also a Grok application itself, this will
provide another test case for Grok. I hope it can drive the
integration of some more components into Grok on a basis of need.

[snip]
> I am currently doing my Ph.D. at the local university

What's your research topic?

[snip]

> I earn my money doing systems administration
> (Linux only) and programming (mostly python/zope-related, but also some
> stuff in Perl, Java, C, C++ and even, sorry, PHP) on a freelancer-basis.

Actually no apologies needed. PHP in particular did some things right,
perhaps by accident, which is why it is so successful. We could learn
some lessons from it. I think the things it got right was very low
barrier to get started (just add a little bit to an existing web
page), and great integration in Apache so easy to deploy.

I hope Zope 3/Grok can make progress and make applications easier to
deploy too. Perhaps using mod_python. Philipp has done some work on
this in the past. Anyway, out of scope for the summer of code, but you
reminded me.

> Thanks to Aroldo Souza-Leites tireless exertions we have not only the
> bones of the Neanderthaler-caveman here in Rheinland, but also a vivid
> zope user group, which at the moment tends to become a _grok_ user
> group ;-) The meeting last month, where I had the prvilege to give a
> short introduction into grok, was dedicated to grok and saw more
> interested participants, than any meeting before. This was really
> astonishing! It seems, that people just waited for grok to start to deal
> with zope3. Someone brought also a club (fortunately, nobody was
> injured ;-)

That's just some awesome! I hope to make it out to the Rheinland again soon.

[snip discussion of projects using Grok]
> By the end of next week, I think, I can give a more elaborated sketch of
> the project in general. Okay?

I'd be very happy to hear more about these developments on grok-dev. I
am currently doing two projects that use Grok and whenever I run into
a framework related issue I start posting on the list about it. I
think this works well to keep Grok development going and focused.

> I will also be at the 8th annual congress of the German Zope User Group
> (DZUG) happening at the beginning of June in Potsdam near Berlin. I know
> that some of you will be there too, so this might be a nice opportunity
> to meet each other personally.

I'll be there too, so looking forward to it!

> I hope, this is enough noise for the very beginning, you do not mind the
> length of this posting and apologize for the bad English.

I haven't noticed a single flaw in your English, which either means
it's fine or that my English is limited itself. :)

Regards,

Martijn