[Pulp-dev] DevConf.cz '18 Event Summary

Tue Jan 30 13:56:33 UTC 2018

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.

Booth & Demos
--------------------

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].

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.

The banner gave the booth a very polished, professional looks. Thanks
@ipanova!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Swag
-------

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.

Pulp3 Plugin Planning Workshop
-----------------------------------------

@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.

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].

We received a lot of feedback, which I'll try to recap here to feed into
revisions of this type of workshop:

* set better expectations: It wasn't clear that this was a planning
workshop. When you expect coding and instead get planning, that is
unexpected.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* We would have benefited from more time. 2 hours was enough to go over the
planning, but really nothing else.

* 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?

Several ideas were generated that I want to recap/share:

* 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.

* 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.

* Office hours: have some synchronous time for on-line collaboration
between collaborators and core devs

Interesting Talks
---------------------

With 2 presentations and booth duty, I didn't get much chance to attend.

[0]: https://photos.app.goo.gl/XEcamQoCj0GsC2Bj1
[1]: https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/Brand_guide
[2]: https://docs.pulpproject.org/en/3.0/nightly/plugins/plugin-
writer/planning-guide.html
[3]: https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/Maven_Plugin
[4]: https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/NuGet_Packages
[5]: https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/Helm_Support

-Brian
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