It’s that time of year again, the PHP North West conference is almost upon us, and this year they are once again running a hackathon. These events are a great way either to carve out some time to get your head down and hack on an idea that’s been in the back of your mind for a while, but they’re also a fabulous way to get involved in collaborating on projects. At PHPNW, you’ll find there are quite a lot of open source projects at the hackathon, standing by to take on anyone interested in getting involved, either just for the evening or beyond. I’ll be there, representing joind.in, a tool which is used by the conference itself. So what kinds of things will there be to do and how can you get involved?

PHP Websites

It’s a PHP conference so we expect there might be a PHP developer or two around at the hackathon – and we’ve got plenty for you to do. Joind.in is an excellent entry-level open source project because it has quite simple requirements. The code is hosted on github but we’ll always be happy to help you get started with git if you need us to, and we have instructions for getting the site up and running. Bring your laptop and some kind of *AMP stack, and we’ll be happy to see you!

As well as the website you may have already seen joind.in, we’re hard at work at a rather more modern, responsive effort: m.joind.in. If you clicked on the link, you can see that there’s plenty to add here, so please come and help us out! The site uses the Slim framework and consumes joind.in’s API rather than connecting directly to the database; it’s up to you whether you use our existing live/test APIs or set up a development copy of your own and contribute to that too …

Resources

• Code for joind.in on GitHub: https://github.com/joindin/joind.in
• Code for m.joind.in on GitHub: https://github.com/joindin/joindin-web2
• We use JIRA for issue tracking, and have some “easypick” issues already identified to make it simple to get started

PHP API

With new websites and mobile applications all under development, there’s an API that will be used as the basis for all of those, helping us to avoid duplicating business logic across multiple platforms. It’s a simple RESTful style of API, but it currently doesn’t expose all the functionality that we’ll eventually need so helping hands are very welcome. It’s a very simple PHP MVC application that works with JSON, so if you’re interested in any of those things this would be a good place to spend your evening – it also has an HTML output handler so you can very easily click around from your browser: api.joind.in.

Resources

• The code for api.joind.in is on Github at https://github.com/joindin/joindin-api

Mobile Development

If the web isn’t shiny enough for you, then the project leads for both our iphone and our android apps will also be at the PHPNW hackathon! They are both nearing a relaunch and we’d appreciate input from anyone with experience developing for these platforms – or anyone who can bring one of these devices along to help us test! If you do, you’ll be able to use the apps all weekend :)

General Resources

In general, all the code is on our GitHub Organisation https://github.com/joindin, and we’ll be easy to find at the hackathon as I expect we’ll be the noisy crowd :) We use IRC for most project communication, so feel free to drop into #joind.in on irc.freenode.net if you want to meet us or ask any questions beforehand or during the event. Things that need to be done (bugs, tasks, etc) are all on our JIRA instance at joindin.jira.com and we use the “easypick” label to identify which issues would make a good starting point for someone new to the project.

We love developers of all stripes so whoever you are and whatever your experience (or lack of!) then come along and say hello – whether you’re ready to jump straight in to the code, or just tag along and see what we’re up to, you’re very welcome.