I have been complaining about a few things in the Alfresco world. One complaint is that a fair chunk presented at Meetups, Devcons and Summit is not meeting our or our customers interests. In fact my past experiences were the reason not to show up in Barcelona last year. Maybe that is just how things are and I should accept that the typical Alfresco Enterprise 10k+ employee customer differs quite a bit from the people we are dealing with. However, now is the time I would like to find out whether there are people with interests somewhat similar to ours.
I think running a local, in person meetup with everybody coming to a bar is difficult. It may work with mainstream things such as Java or Javascript, but I doubt Alfresco world penetration is there yet. Hence, the idea is to have a community-driven virtual meetup at Google+ – a (non public) hangout.
I always found the direct face to face chatting in breaks or after hours the best, most valuable part. I propose two of my personal itching topics for open discussion:
- Things you want fixed/added/removed in core : I have a quite a bit of this kind. Search is one example. Nowadays, I tend to “fix” thoses issue in extension code, but that feels pretty wrong. I would be interested to hear what other people are waiting for to happen in core. What for example if there are a fair amount of people who want serious low level changes such as OSGI or Spring 4 ?
- Developer tooling : Lets be honest. Alfresco development can be painful. How do developers help themselves and what can be done about it? I for one want to enjoy coding. Aikau surely is a step in the right direction. Have a look at WebStorm 5.0 – Live Edit with Google Chrome do get an idea what I am aiming at. ;)
Feel free to make suggestions and add your two cents if there is something you would like to talk about.
I will give my best organizing the hangout. The current limit for participants is ten, so the first ten people registering get in (If we actually get ten). To me, it does not matter whether people joining are developers or users or whether they are Community, Partner or Alfresco and what their experience level is. Just drop me a line if you would like to participate. I will keep that information confidently.
The hangout will be a Tue Jul 1st at 5pm CEST (assuming there is at least one person registering).
Register now ! ;)
Some people have failed to pass the German captcha, so we have disabled it for now.
Anyways, it is worth noting that Richard Esplin (from Alfresco) is planning to join in. You might want to have a look over at Google+ : https://plus.google.com/102196383173594727132/posts/aVVY5Y4VoFb