A-Team contribution opportunity – Dashboard Hacker

I am excited to announce a new focused project for contribution – Dashboard Hacker.  Last week we gave a preview that today we would be announcing 2 contribution projects.  This is an unpaid program where we are looking for 1-2 contributors who will dedicate between 5-10 hours/week for at least 8 weeks.  More time is welcome, but not required.

What is a dashboard hacker?

When a developer is ready to land code, they want to test it. Getting the results and understanding the results is made a lot easier by good dashboards and tools. For this project, we have a starting point with our performance data view to fix up a series of nice to have polish features and then ensure that it is easy to use with a normal developer workflow. Part of the developer work flow is the regular job view, If time permits there are some fun experiments we would like to implement in the job view.  These bugs, features, projects are all smaller and self contained which make great projects for someone looking to contribute.

What is required of you to participate?

• A willingness to learn and ask questions
• A general knowledge of programming (most of this will be in javascript, django, angularJS, and some work will be in python.
• A promise to show up regularly and take ownership of the issues you are working on
• Good at solving problems and thinking out of the box
• Comfortable with (or willing to try) working with a variety of people

What we will guarantee from our end:

• A dedicated mentor for the project whom you will work with regularly throughout the project
• A single area of work to reduce the need to get up to speed over and over again.
  • This project will cover many tools, but the general problem space will be the same
• The opportunity to work with many people (different bugs could have a specific mentor) while retaining a single mentor to guide you through the process
• The ability to be part of the team- you will be welcome in meetings, we will value your input on solving problems, brainstorming, and figuring out new problems to tackle.

How do you apply?

Get in touch with us either by replying to the post, commenting in the bug or just contacting us on IRC (I am :jmaher in #ateam on irc.mozilla.org, wlach on IRC will be the primary mentor).  We will point you at a starter bug and introduce you to the bugs and problems to solve.  If you have prior work (links to bugzilla, github, blogs, etc.) that would be useful to learn more about you that would be a plus.

How will you select the candidates?

There is no real criteria here.  One factor will be if you can meet the criteria outlined above and how well you do at picking up the problem space.  Ultimately it will be up to the mentor (for this project, it will be :wlach).  If you do apply and we already have a candidate picked or don’t choose you for other reasons, we do plan to repeat this every few months.

Looking forward to building great things!