The summer is coming up and I will be having a lot of time on my hands. I thought spending the time collaborating on a project online with several other passionated programmers somewhere in the world would be a great idea. I've never tried online collaboration before although I am used to working in larger teams and using source control, so it would mainly be the lack of direct communication that would be new to me. I would be interested in starting a project with programmers around my own level or (preferably) better and finishing the project over the summer/fall.
One problem, however. Where would I go about finding people for such a project? I'm not interested in joining an on-going project but rather be part of a new one. Certainly there must exist sites online where this is possible? The project properly wouldn't huge in any way. I'm thinking a little cozy project such as a arcade 2d game, a subtitle site, a world cup stats tracker or similiar.
Also, what would be a better approach. Finding the people for the project and then come up with an idea for the project or putting an idea out there and see if anyone was interested?
PS: If anyone on this site find the idea interesting feel free to post here or PM me and we'll have a talk about it.
The Google Summer of Code is really perfect for that (and there usually are very interesting projects to work on):
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a
global program that offers student
developers stipends to write code for
various open source software projects.
We have worked with several open
source, free software, and
technology-related groups to identify
and fund several projects over a three
month period. Since its inception in
2005, the program has brought together
over 3,500 students and more than more
than 4,000 mentors & co-mentors from
nearly 100 countries worldwide, all
for the love of code. Through Google
Summer of Code, accepted student
applicants are paired with a mentor or
mentors from the participating
projects, thus gaining exposure to
real-world software development
scenarios and the opportunity for
employment in areas related to their
academic pursuits. In turn, the
participating projects are able to
more easily identify and bring in new
developers. Best of all, more source
code is created and released for the
use and benefit of all.
Go check fast if you can still enroll.
To expand on Symen Timmermans answer, non-profit agencencies traditionally do not have the budget to fund many of their IT needs and would probably really appreciate some volunteer IT assistance. I would think you could easily muster up a summer project by approaching some agencies. Be clear that you are offering your services for free.
Besides gaining some exposure to some real-world problems, this may be an opportunity to network within your area. And it also looks pretty good on a resume.
This, perhaps, will lead you in the direction of a project. From there you could try contacting people you know or perhaps ask around at a local user group to see if anyone is interested in collaborating with you.
The OpenHatch.org website exists to help connect people with tasks that need to be completed on various Open Source projects, and to connect them with mentors in the target languages/technologies.
On the Volunteer Opportunities page, you can search through hundreds of open tickets in over 250 projects. On the People page, you can search for others who are willing to mentor you in the target subject with a search like can_mentor:"Python", or search for others near you, and more. The more people that join on the web site, the more visibility that it gets for more projects and people to come and participate, so why not join in the fun?
Why a programming project?
Your tag 'nonprogramming' sparked some ideas. Why don't you research possibilities in your neighbourhood for things like community projects? There might be plenty of organizations looking for you as a volunteer.
Though those projects might not seem as challenging as an innovative programming project can be, they can be really rewarding, especially if you directly witness the benefit your collective effort provides to others. Also you might learn a new skill, meet interesting people, and learn new things about yourself.
Think about it.
First you'd have to think about what kind of project you wanna do.
Game, etc..
Then I would look for a Forum / Community and start looking there for mini-projects.
I however have no particular site to offer you currently.
Also I believe the communities will depend on the languages etc... you are comfortable programming in.
Cheers,
Build It With Me is a website made for connecting developer and designers with ideas.
To find people to work with you on a new project, you have :
to go where they are
to convince them to work with you
Programming folks can be met directly on IRC. Go to a channel corresponding to the computing language you like, and you'll met great people, knowing your language and wasting their time on IRC. You have then to convince them to stop wasting time saying nothing on IRC and to go with you on a new project.
Summer is already well started, so you should choose a small project that can be useful to anybody. People will work with you if the project you propose them is interesting enough for them. Here is an idea of a useful tool that does not exist yet :
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20100613/web-server-log-forensics-app-wanted/
You could try going to SourceForge and finding a new project or creating your own. They have a large community there so you shouldn't have any trouble finding people to work with.
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I'm considering Prestashop for a new project. It seems to be younger than Zen-Cart and osCommerce. Since I just found it by Google, I'd like to gather comments and experience and comparison of Prestashop to established "brands" like Zen-Cart and osCommerce
I work daily with PrestaShop. I think that it's the perfect solution for an average project. If you need something extremely fancy (but also extremely difficult to configure/use) you should go for Magento. I'm a programmer and I've had difficulties setting it up like I wanted. The learning curve is too steep. Of course it brings other advantages, but the project has to be big enough to make up for the time lost in learning to use the the platform.
The thing I like the most about PrestaShop it's the ease of use (for both the developer and the shop admin). Its modular system completely demolishes osCommerce. Everytime I have to work on an osCommerce shop, I cringe. It's outdated and it's not a good option, by any means. If you need to change the layout of the store, you just drag modules around in the Back Office. There's no cutting and pasting code in PHP files. The same for installing new modules.
In my opinion, PrestaShop is mature enough at this point. There are hundreds of modules you can use to customize it to your liking (just do a google search or try their forum). The template system is also top-notch and easy to use. Take a look at what you can do: http://www.templatemonster.com/prestashop-themes.php
I also messed around with VirtueMart. It's not a bad solution if you want to integrate your shop with a CMS (Joomla). There's also TomatoCart, a new-comer (they still don't have documentation for developers) that's based on osCommerce 3 alpha, but from what I've seen it's a major improvement. The Back Office is amazing.
Summing it up, I think PrestaShop is excellent if you need something that's easy to use, easy to configure and flexible. Magento is better for LARGE projects because there's a lot of overhead. If you are planning on configuring more stores in the future, the time lost learning Magento might be acceptable.
We install and review all open source eCommerce solutions as a matter of course. So we have looked in depth at all the one mentioned here. I prefer osCommerce to Prestashop. Prestashop is too immature and simply does not have the in-built functionality or breadth of Add Ons. It is not a "lite" version of Magento by any means.
As to the other poster's comment about osCommerce and Magento. Magento is an out of the box solution which is very difficult to customize. You need to be a programmer to work with it and even then the learning curve is steep. And if you do customize, you then are buying out of their upgrade path. Which is why the average site does not customize and why so many Magento stores look so much alike.
Unlike Magento, osCommerce has and always will be intended as a core eCommerce solution on which you build you own unique eCommerce solution.
Two different approaches to building an eCommerce site. One is cookie cutter then other is fast track to custom solution.
As one that love working with Magento i just wanted to show you this article.
If i were in the works of setting up an site for online commerce, i wouldn't choose ZenCart or OSC. They are both old and doesnt update at all. But thats just an personal opinion. And i work a lot with these things.
My Prestashop knowledge is limited though, but if its anything like Magento i would recommend it. Cuz Magento is by far the leading commerce platform atm. Also just my 2 cents.
Magento vs Prestashop
More reading OSC vs ZenCart
PrestaShop is an impressive new entry to the field, with a very attractive user interface and impressive product option/variant capabilities (like Zen Cart attributes). One downside is that it's much harder to modify; there is nothing like the Zen Cart "templating " capability so you're always changing core files. This gets hard to manage with the frequent release schedule PrestaShop is using. But you should definitely install it and spend some time testing it and evaluating its suitability for your shop.
prestashop is much easier than zen cart, oscommerce and magento. the easiest thing to do is try to install them as they are all free.
#Arta incorrectly stated, with regard to ZenCart,
They are both old and doesn't update at all.
ZenCart IS maintained, IS updated frequently and DOES have a decent roadmap into the future along with a robust community.
Here is a recent (March 2011) update from the ZenCart Team:
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=175569
Personally, I have installed, configured and maintained no less than 3 ZenCart shops, having found ZenCart subsequent to using "Selena Sol's" and Gunther Birzniek's Perl-based eCommerce app creatively named, "WebStore" for several years.
I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when I found ZenCart because I am not a programmer - I'm just a plugger who pushes hard enough on something to make it work.
With ZenCart, the community help is excellent. The "Getting Started" documentation got me started and got my websites running.
I've looked at Magento (too da*n complicated) and just about every shopping cart that's out there.
Maybe I'm just getting old but things that are shiny and new still do not compare to my OLD ZenCart for the key features I need:
Secure.
Integrates with Authorize.net & Paypal, among others.
TRUE Quantity Pricing.
Price based on Options.
Categories.
Fine, granular control over Product page Title and Keywords.
Easy to update when updates are released because I don't muck with CORE files (and I've never had to).
Thriving, responsive community.
Open-source. TRULY open-source.
I do have one complaint, though. I WISH the folks at ZenCart would reorganize their add-ons page to make it easier for ppl to find an add-on and know when the add-on was last updated. But as you can see, this is not a complaint about the Shopping Cart software itself.
Hope this helps.
I agree with Val booth. Zen cart is the best and easiest. It has just about any option you can imagine, the templating is easy to install and adjust, and help comes very quick for questions posted in the forum.
My only beef with Zen cart is that the control panel the user logs into is a little complex for any changes if you are a computer newbie. This is only because setting are located in different places instead of one area only. There are many features in some cases located in multiple places. Say you want to add features to your homepage, you might have to go to one area to check a box to enable the features on the homepage, another area to defind the features, and another area to list the features. Meaning you have to bounce around. I have been using zen cart for several years and have it installed on many of my clients websites. The control panel always takes a little training for my clients. With that being said the reason for this is because this program has any feature imaginable. That means more complexity (Not it's not that difficult you just have to bounce around to make big changes).
As far as features this is the main reason why you should use Zen Cart. Let me give you a recent example. One of my clients charges tax for Ohio and California. Two different rates it wasn't a problem (just a little help from the forum and a couple of changes in the control panel). Next, they wanted free shipping to the USA only. Not a problem worldwide shipping for a charge (USPS) and free shipping within the USA. They also have lots of options for each product. No problem. I tell my customers: "With Zen Cart you can grow into your carts features years down the road." The structure is already there even if you don't think you need certain features now. Instead of having to install a different cart, we just enable a new module or feature. It's common for the needs of a business to change. As your website (business needs) change the zen cart features are already there waiting for you.
Don't overlook the fact that has been mentioned in these posts about zen cart updates. When you make changes to any core coding it goes in it's own folder named after your template. When you update the cart it does not mess up any of your past changes. This is very powerful because updates are common and easy and you don't need to re-modify your past changes! With other large programs this is not the case and puts a lot more work on you for each new update. Look in forums all over the web and you will see that Zen cart is the most flexible, the easiest to use, and has the most features.
No I have no affilaite with Zen cart at all, I am just a regular webmaster who installs shopping carts onto my clients websites and has been asking questions in their forums for years. I can tell you from my experience Zen Cart is the bomb!
I found prestashop more powerful but to customize it you must have knoeledge on CSS , smarty template and php. For me it is better than Zen and Os
Having used oscommerce, zen cart and more recently prestashop I would say prestashop is probably one of the easier solutions for building a relatively simple, attractive looking site. My main site is zen cart but I'm considering changing to prestashop. Unless you are an experienced designer / developer then I'd stay clear of oscommerce and go for zen cart or presta. Zen Cart is in a way a simpler version of oscommerce. Prestashop just looks more tidy and less like an "out of the box" solution to the untrained eye than os and zen. Some of the free templates are pretty tidy, and with the odd change to a few images it's relatively easy to customize the feel. Function is another story. As stated before there's limited documentation and community with presta - which i'm sure will grow steadily over the next year or so, which might make a beginer go with another solution.
Ive been using OSC these past few years and recently i started exploring Prestashop. I find presta harder to modify compared to OSC.
I think if you are more of a visual designer, it is easier to use OSC. But if u are more of a businessman, u should go for presta. The interface can be customizable but it'd take more time compared to OSC.
i have used Oscommerce and yesterday i have just installed prestashop....and i found presta a bit harder than osc because it is fully object oriented and uses smarty template.
i think it is harder to modify presta than osc.
Prestashop has been growing and improving extremely fast, both in number of users / forum members, and in development / features added.
A good resource to start with is the new book "[PrestaShop 1.3 Beginner's Guide]", it goes though all the important features in Prestashop and guide you towards getting your shop online and having your first sale in one week.
In addition to doing technical review for the book, I am also an English Moderator on the Prestashop forum, and I see people with no programming or website development background manage to install and customize their own shops, add themes, modules and modification with little or no help.
The [Prestashop forum] has been growing rapidly as well, it reached nearly 90,000 members, and is by far the best place to get help or questions answered, usually within a short period of time.
Make sure you search the forum first, because many questions have already been answered…
Speaking as a representative of the company:
For a small business or anyone without a massive dedicated server, PrestaShop is probably the best choice. Any of these options will have a steep learning curve, but I would have to say that PrestaShop is the easiest to get up and running compared to the rest.
Also, we've really made a commitment to customer service, and the forums have become a much better place to get answers since we opened an office in the United States.
The prestashop as good as it looks has still very little or no documentation and or ridicilously complex written smarty templ. stuff, driving us "open source" fanatics, like cattle into bottleneck traps forced to buy our way out.
Don't forget it's a company! they are even hiring at the moment. and we will be caught.
and imho, "open source" by a company?
reaping all the benefits of community development, organising predators and game refuge paths for a nice game hunting season.
I am starting a game design project with a group of three other students. We would like to use some open source hosting service for version control, a wiki, etc. I have looked at threads like these (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10490/best-open-source-project-hosting-site, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29736/what-open-source-hosting-service-should-i-use, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities) but am still not sure which is best for our situation. Those threads seem to focus more on large scale, long term open source projects, whereas my group will be small and working together for a relatively short time.
Here are my constraints:
group of 4-5 people
10+ hours per week per person spent working on this project until May 2010
Language/framework: C# XNA
IDE: Visual Studio 2008
project will be no bigger than 100 mb
Features that would be nice to have:
Wiki
Milestone tracking
Issue/bug tracking
Code reviews
Document hosting (like the game manual, design spec, etc)
I'm thinking CodePlex would be nice because of its support for Visual Studio. I've had a positive experience with CodePlex in the past for a tiny project. However, Assembla has a nice UI, and its time tracking feature/linking tickets to SVN commits seems like it could be really helpful. (The time tracking in particular appeals to me, because if certain group members are slacking it could show through here.)
Google Code has been praised by many in the aforementioned threads, and everyone in my group has a Google account.
Also, I'm not sure which license we should pick for our project.
Codeplex already has lots of XNA related projects being hosted on it. One of the great things about codeplex is that you can choose from a large number of source control clients. It supports the TFS client, SVN, and mercurial. So from a flexibility perspective, it's very very simple.
From a license perspective ... well, you didn't really give enough information about what your goals are. Do you want a license like GPL, which ensures that your code can't be used in a closed source project dodwnstream? Do you not really care who does what?
Personally, for the open source projects I've hosted on codeplex, I prefer the mozilla public license. It basically says the code is as is, and you can do whatever you want with it, open or closed.
Google Code has been praised by many
in the aforementioned threads, and
everyone in my group has a Google
account.
I think this coupled with easy usage of Docs/Groups/etc. and what not for things you dont nesscearily want public as well as group integration, all with interfaces that the entire team is most likely already used to working with, makes it a logical choice unless there are some features better fulfilled by another service in your opinion. In not nessecarily singing the normal paraises of google here - it just seems like a very pragmatic no fuss solution.
Just signed up for a trial at fogcreek.com/Fogbugz after reading Joel's latest blog post. I think the features are very nice, but there are simply too many of them, and I'm having a hard time learning the platform.
Is there any online quick start guide or an one hour crash course that I can get started from?
I'm aware of a book called Painless Project Management with FogBugz, but how relevant is it to FogBugz 7.0?
Thank you.
I'd suggest looking in the help of FogBugz itself, specifically FogBugz in two minutes and The basics of bug tracking sections. That would give you a quick grounding.
The second edition of the FogBugz book by Mike Gunderloy was written for 6.0, but the core idea of how you use FogBugz on a team to track bugs and schedules is fundamentally the same, so this book is still quite worthwhile.
Fog Creek also runs webinars which you can sign up for on their site (see the WEBINAR tab).
There's a philosophy behind this program, that "there's nothing that you have to enter". That means you can just jump in and start playing. Part of the necessary learning curve is just getting used to the interface. Once you're past that, the help, articles, and books make a lot more sense.
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I have a challenge I need some input on.
I am currently recruiting programmers for a new development department. I am looking for people that are brilliant at their work – so brilliant that they might “lack” some other things that I normally would require them to have (e.g. speaking Norwegian and (to be honest) – social skills in order to be able to meet the customer (I’ve worked with several of them before :) )).
My issue is in regards to communication between the client (customer) and the development team.
Background: We have a strategy of becoming our customers extended development department over the next two years. E.g. they consider us as their own department just sitting somewhere else. While we are on our way towards this target, we will have to make money on smaller projects. The work is there, so I am not afraid that we will not manage to stay alive.
But – we all know that good communication with the customer is one of the key elements on providing the customer with what they actually want (we are scrumming by the way) instead of something else. How do I manage to do this with people that do not speak the language, or again, does not even have the skills to communicate with the customer (you all know someone very bright that is going into deep technical issues with a customer that hardly knows the difference between Firefox & Opera)?
I have landed on a solution where I will be the interface towards the customer, the customer will join in on planning sessions, etc., and where the team will still do the demo. But in regards to continuous communication (daily) between the dev team and the customer, I will be the one doing the comms.
I know that this is not the optimal solution – being a middle man a lot of information can disappear between the customer, me and the team. Have anyone been in a similar situation?
Create a wiki. Create a page for your customer which contains pictures, business information, things to look out for, etc.
Have everyone contribute to the wiki, including the customer.
As time goes on, this page (or pages if you split the information on numerous pages) will allow
new developers to understand the customer faster
see the possible problems that may arise
your developers would contribute to the wiki since they have a tangible documentation where everyone can see how much they have contributed to the customer.
make the customer feel as if he is part of the development process
since the wiki is, by effect, a collaboration document, a common language will appear between everyone. It might not be the same as speaking your customer's language, but it will be a combination of your customer's and developer's language.
We've had a somewhat similar situation when we did "Beta programs" for select customers. When the customers had questions, they could only turn to the developers at that stage of the project because e.g. the helpdesk was not yet familiar with the new features.
We also used a "middle man" for doingt the communication with the customer and then passing it on to the developers, and this has worked quite well for us. What were the advantages? The customer alsways knew exactly whom to contact, the communication was consistent, some on the simpler questions could be answered without the need to "bug" the development team at all while some more difficult questions could be "boiled down" from a superfluous explanation to the real problem before handing the question over to the developers, both giving the developers more time to concentrate on what they do best.
Of course, if you want this to work, you'll have to make sure you pass on information between development and the customer in a timely manner, but I think it can be worth the effort (and in fact, our developers prefer it that way).
Communication skills are arguably more important than technical skills. A programmer that doesn't communicate well may well cause enough disruption to negate what they bring to the table technically.
Having said that, you still have to realize that not everyone is the best person to be "customer facing". You might designate one or more members of the team as liasons to your customers, and have the communication go through them when possible.
The developers should be shielded from the customers. Developers are usually hardcore technical people who eat C++ templates at breakfast. The customers are often very non-technical. A customer asking a badly formulated question on some trivial issue to the developer usually irritates the developer a lot causing at least a temporary loss of productivity. So it's better to have special paid people that work in between.
Don't underestimate the value of being in the same place. If communication skills are lacking, being able to point and say "look at this" can be far quicker and more effective than trying to explain everything in a meeting or email. But from "they consider us as their own department just sitting somewhere else" this doesn't sound like it is an option for you.
Generally I expect that at least some of your developers will be open to learning proper communication with the customer. Involve those developers with the communication (even if it's painful at first). English is a pretty universal language and your customer will probably be able and willing to speak it.
Shield the developers that DON'T want to communicate or learn to communicate with the customers. They may damage your relationship with the customer and you will damage your relationship with your employee.
Be careful about allowing written contact between the customer and your developers. Written communication often gets interpreted wrong, especially when written by people who do not have much experience writing carefully balanced e-mails, memos or letters.
As you build your relationship with your customer, you'll get to know eachother's personalities, and communication will be smoother.
This may sound strange but sometimes when your ASP.NET webapp isn't working and you can't tell why, you call Microsoft, pay them something like $300 and get about 1-3 weeks of 1-3 people looking at your configuration, memory dumps, sometimes code... but usually not the db, and with a fairly good percentage they help you fix your mistakes, without necessarily up-selling you.
I found that Novell would like to offer that for Mono. Everyone knows MySQL offers it for their clients, because it was part of the reason they got a truck of money to swing by one day to change the name-plate on the door.
I'm curious if anyone has found people for the support of these, and how they'd rate their experience:
Django
Rails
Grails
JRuby
Mono [ratings]
add your own.
I haven't ever looked for paid support for these open source technologies, but in general I would guess until there is significant market penetration there won't be a business case for 'dial in support' of an app built by a third party.
In general, you'll be looking for a niche technology expert consultant that will probably charge you an hourly rate to look at your problem.
For django - look at djangogigs.com, or post on rentacoder.com I suppose.
Each usually has an irc channel - you could also ask general questions there, or try to find someone for hire.
That niche is typically handled by 2 groups I believe
Software component developers. - I get a lot of my presentation layer support from DevExpress since I use their widgets for my GUIs for instance. In fact, typically I don't use a technology in an official capacity unless I have identified a dependable support channel.
The issue you raise with Microsoft is handle by abstracting your problem before reporting it. That's a common law with most commercial support channels: When an issue involves 2 vendors, they will blame each other! Your job is to first isolate the issue before or during reporting.
It's hard, I know, but that's why you get paid the big bucks :-)
Is to bring in an outside consultant that should be able to study your system and do what we described in part 1 ( above )