<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div>This past weekend several Pulp core devs attended DevConf.cz in Brno, Czech Republic. Here is a summary of the activities we participated in there. Any feedback, questions, or discussion is welcome.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Booth & Demos<br>--------------------<br><br></div>Pulp
had a booth setup on both Friday and Saturday. Overall the messaging
was designed to gain new users, updated existing users on the Pulp3
progress and changes, and drive traffic to the plugin writer's workshop,
which was on Sunday. It was a 2-table booth shared with Foreman, so
each project had their own table. Pics are here [0].<br></div><br></div>We
had 6 people helping with the booth, and everyone worked hard to share
the load. A big thanks to @tterehsc, @pulpmilan, @rchan, @ipanova, and
@dkliban. It really does take a number like 6 people to staff the booth
and not totally wear everyone out.<br><div><div><div><br></div><div>The banner gave the booth a very polished, professional looks. Thanks @ipanova!</div><div><br></div><div>We
did not run the booth on Sunday, with the observation that last year we
did not get much traffic and almost no "new" traffic to the booth. Not
setting it up on Sunday I think was the right decision.</div><div><br></div><div>We
had a screen setup showing a slide with the 50 word version of the
Brand Guide [1]. This was something I saw OSAS do at their booths, and
it worked well for us. It's great to not have to explain the most basic
things about Pulp over and over, but instead spend the energy answering
questions or understanding what the user's needs are.<br></div><div><br></div><div>We
did not have a demo at the booth at first, and several people wanted to
"see" something, so we started demo-ing Pulp3 about half-way through.
Next time I'll want to have a demo ready on the same machine showing the
branding slides that we can switch back-and-forth between.</div><div><br></div><div>We
had a corner spot, which makes it practically difficult for people to
even talk to us. That didn't prevent us from going out and talking to
them, but next year we should really try to get a different spot.</div><div><br></div><div>I'm
really glad @rchan was able to be there too. A manager has never joined
us at a booth before, and I can see now that it provides a unique
opportunity to see/meet/listen to Pulp users. Especially, those users
who are outside of Red Hat.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Take these
numbers with a grain of salt. Overall I would say 30% of the people we
talked do already knew about or used Pulp. Roughly 10% of those who did
not use Pulp were using an alternative like Artifactory or Nexus.
Roughly 20% of the folks we talked to self-identified as QE, which makes
sense after QECamp. A few folks wanted several shirts for their team
because they are in-progress of deploying Pulp at their org. :) I think
it's probably 85% - 90% Red Hatters.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Swag</div><div>-------</div><div><br></div><div>People
love the new tshirts (thanks @ipanova!). We kind of quickly ran out of M
and L shirts, so we probably will order a bit more of those sizes next
time.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Pulp3 Plugin Planning Workshop</div><div>------------------------------<wbr>-----------</div><div><br></div><div>@dkliban
and I delivered a planning workshop which delivered slide versions of
this content [2]. There were 11 people who attended, but if you remove
co-workers, managers, and just leave people I don't know, we had 5.
That's actually pretty great considering those are 5 potential plugin
contributors.</div><div><br></div><div>The goal was to facilitate
attendees writing a plan that outlines the requirements for a specific
content type with the thinking they would take that plan and implement
it from our docs. We invited users to post these plans into the wiki to
get the info into the open. Here are the posted plans that were made:
Maven [3], NuGet [4], and Helm [5].</div><div><br></div><div>We received a lot of feedback, which I'll try to recap here to feed into revisions of this type of workshop:</div><div><br></div><div>*
set better expectations: It wasn't clear that this was a planning
workshop. When you expect coding and instead get planning, that is
unexpected.</div><div><br></div><div>* Identify the audience better:
This was for developers, but that wasn't entirely clear. We didn't talk
much about Pulp3 specifically because it was planning focused, but the
title suggested it would tell you a lot about Pulp3. This expectation
mismatch is something we could have been more clear about up front.<br></div><div><br></div><div>*
provide an architectural introduction to what a plugin needs to do. We
did not provide enough context before starting into the "ok now your
plugin needs to do X, Y, and Z because that is what Pulp needs". We need
a great diagram.<br></div><div><br></div><div>* show off pulp_file early on. We didn't have time to do this, but I think it's the code-level view people wanted to see.</div><div><br></div><div>*
It needs to be at least two sessions. One session on planning like we
did, and a followup session to outline how to actually write code to do
that with the plugin API. It was suggested there be a night in between
these to allow for digestion of information on day 1.</div><div><br></div><div>* We would have benefited from more time. 2 hours was enough to go over the planning, but really nothing else.</div><div><br></div><div>* We need to think more about the approach: "Is this workshop focused on learning to be applied later, or is it a chance to start working on a new plugin now?" Put another way, is this workshop for me to learn how to write a plugin by recreating a simple plugin that already exists, or is it a time to start on something that has never been written?<br></div><div><br></div><div>Several ideas were generated that I want to recap/share:</div><div><br></div><div>*
An alternate format. Instead of having users each plan their own
content type, have all users make a plugin that is simple and
well-understood (cat photos) instead of encouraging users to charge into
the unknown and actually plan a real content type.</div><div><br></div><div>*
Youtube series: Offer all of the content ^ as a multi-part youtube
series, with each session being pretty short ( < 15 minutes ). This
would become a self-paced course that plugin writers could go through on
their own.<br></div><div><br></div><div>* Office hours: have some synchronous time for on-line collaboration between collaborators and core devs</div><div><br></div><div>Interesting Talks</div><div>---------------------</div><div><br></div><div>With 2 presentations and booth duty, I didn't get much chance to attend.<br></div><div><br></div><div>[0]: <a href="https://photos.app.goo.gl/XEcamQoCj0GsC2Bj1">https://photos.app.goo.gl/XEcamQoCj0GsC2Bj1</a><br></div><div>[1]: <a href="https://pulp.plan.io/projects/">https://pulp.plan.io/projects/</a><wbr>pulp/wiki/Brand_guide</div><div>[2]: <a href="https://docs.pulpproject.org/en/3.0/nightly/plugins/plugin-writer/planning-guide.html" target="_blank">https://docs.pulpproject.org/<wbr>en/3.0/nightly/plugins/plugin-<wbr>writer/planning-guide.html</a><br></div><div>[3]: <a href="https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/Maven_Plugin">https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/Maven_Plugin</a><br></div><div>[4]: <a href="https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/NuGet_Packages">https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/NuGet_Packages</a><br></div><div>[5]: <a href="https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/Helm_Support">https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/Helm_Support</a><br></div><div><br></div><div>-Brian<br></div></div></div></div>