Start: 
2017-06-15 (All day) - 2017-06-18 (All day) America/Toronto

Organizers: 

xjm

Event type: 

Sprint

DrupalCamp Montréal is coming up this Thursday to Sunday (June 15th to 18th), with great trainings, two days of sessions, and a dedicated sprint day on Sunday. The sprint gives you a great opportunity to get involved and make a difference for the things that affect Drupal and your projects. You don't need to be an expert, developer, or existing contributor to get involved. Here are three current focus areas that we'll collaborate on on this week!

Major issue triage

Major issue triage sprints have been held at many DrupalCons and camps recently and Montréal will continue these efforts. We want to fix the most important bugs in Drupal, but the first step to that is making sure bug reports are up to date and actionable. That is where major issue triage helps: identifying reports that should be critical, closing ones that are no longer relevant, downgrading ones that are actually less severe, and making sure relevant reports can move forward to a fix. Sometimes just asking questions for clarification on bug reports will move things ahead a lot. Still not convinced this sprint is for you? Read more in my blog post from earlier this year.

Make upgrade paths easier with @deprecated documentation

We made several changes in the release process with Drupal 8 to make Drupal upgrades easy forever. One of them is that we improve Drupal's APIs in scheduled six-month minor releases, but also leave the old ways of doing things in place and mark them as deprecated until Drupal 9. This huge shift for Drupal allows module maintainers to adapt to changes gradually, on their own schedule, instead of needing a massive push all at once on some later release date.

API deprecations are documented in change records on Drupal.org, and also marked directly in the code documentation. We started marking deprecated code almost two years ago as we were preparing to release Drupal 8.0.0, and we have been creating change record documentation since the release of Drupal 7. Unfortunately, we did not start to connect the two until recently, so it was not possible to read more about a certain change when you encountered a deprecated API. Help make these connections for an easier upgrade path for everyone.

Clearly define Drupal's public APIs

As we mentioned above, Drupal 8 has 6-month minor releases that improve APIs (as well as adding new features). In order to make this safe, clear, and maintainable, we defined what parts of Drupal's APIs are internal through a documented policy, but that is not very explicit for developers. Making this explicit in code documentation is more effective for anyone reading the code or developing with an IDE. By helping with this effort, you can learn a lot about Drupal 8 APIs and help with the upgrade path through documenting a better-defined API surface.

Also, help me help sprinters!

I'll be in the Montréal sprint room all four days of the camp to work with potential contributors and show them how to help with these tasks, but I could use some help myself. If you have experience with Drupal 8 (even a little) or have past experience sprinting on major triage or mentoring at Drupal events, please ping me. Helping others is an especially important way to contribute back. On that note, many thanks to camp organizers for making these sprints possible.

À jeudi! See you at the camp!

Thanks to Gábor Hojtsy for help with this post.