Tag Archives: open source

04 Dec
2020

Bystanders Guide to Repository Maintenance

Today’s post is about bystanders and open source. We sometimes have anxiety about doing things on “other people’s” projects but the thing about open source is that those are not “their” projects, those are “our” projects, and they only exist because people other than their nominated gatekeepers chip in now and then. Continue reading →
06 Jul
2020

Add a Screenshot Button to Streamdeck with Golang

I’m the proud owner of a Streamdeck XL but as an Ubuntu user, the tool support isn’t great. There’s a Python library that gives a bit of a GUI but I found it hard to use and I’d have needed to put each piece of functionality as a commandline script that this program could call. Instead, I am using go-streamdeck to create a custom application – and I’m having fun! Today’s example adds a single button that runs a command to take a screenshot. Continue reading →
14 Aug
2016

Joind.In Needs Help

This post is about the open source project, Joind.in. Joind.in is a tool to allow attendees at conferences or other events to offer immediate public feedback to speakers and organisers at those events. Joind.in is an open source project run by volunteers. For the last 6 years I’ve been a maintainer of this project, following a year or two of being a contributor. Over the last few months, myself and my comaintainer Rob Allen have been mostly inactive due to other commitments, and we have agreed it’s time to step aside and let others take up the baton. Continue reading →
Posted in php
12 Jun
2014

What Got You Involved in Open Source?

I did a very unscientific twtpoll recently regarding what brought each of us into open source. Plenty of people took the time to vote or retweet, so I thought I’d loop back around and let you know how it looked overall when the poll closed. Continue reading →
25 Mar
2013

First Phing Plugin

I’m a huge fan of Phing and use it regularly for build and deployment tasks. Often, I’ll ask about a plugin that I wish existed, and get a very courteous “patches welcome” from the nice people in the channel on freenode. This has happened a few times, so I thought I should probably look at how to make a new phing plugin, this article shows you how to make the simplest thing I could think of: a simple “hello world” plugin. Continue reading →
12 Jul
2012

Lesson Learned: Look in the Pull Request Queue

If you follow me on twitter you might have seen some overexcitement when I managed to edit and compile a vala application recently. I use a great deal of open source tools, but many of them don’t seem open to me, because I don’t have the skills to modify the code. Regardless of that, it’s still vitally important that it is open (this is a whole other post and I’ll avoid that tangent right now). Continue reading →
26 Mar
2012

Using JIRA’s REST API to Create a Dashboard

If you read this blog often, you’ll know that I am:

  • crazy about APIs
  • living with some accessibility issues

Put these two things together and what do you get? Actually don’t answer that! Today what you get is an example of integrating with JIRA’s REST API, because their recent “upgrade” locked me out of the issue listings pages completely and I really do need to be able to see a list of bugs! Their bug editing screen is quite usable, so it’s just the list that I need here, but you could easily call their other API methods as you need to. Continue reading →

13 Mar
2012

Speaking at Leeds PHP

On Monday 19th March I’ll be speaking at PHP Leeds. The topic is all things git and github; as an open source project lead I see lots of very capable programmers taking their first steps with github. In this session we’ll talk about how you can use these tools to contribute to open source (or your own projects, of course), covering both “what to click in the web interface” and “what to type at the command line” for git and github respectively. Come along if you want to know more about git, open source, or github!