Tag: joindin

I've been using Optic's CLI, an OpenAPI tool that does a bunch of things including diffing OpenAPI descriptions and comparing HTTP traffic with OpenAPI. My use case was an established API that didn't have an OpenAPI file yet - using Optic we could create one as a starting point, and then move to a design-first workflow to make the changes that I was there to help with. For this blog post, I've used the example of https://api.joind.in as an excellent representation of an API still in use, but without an OpenAPI file and not built with code that a code generator would recognise.

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.

I'm an open source project maintainer, working on the projects associated with joind.in, and recently we added a Code of Conduct to all our projects (we have quite a few as you can see from our github organisation page https://github.com/joindin).

I feel the same way about codes of conduct for open source projects as I do about codes of conduct for events. You can absolutely run a totally safe and effective event without one, but by having one you make very clear what your expectations are - and in turn this manages the expectations of the people attending that event.

It's PHPNW time again, and that means hackathon! This conference has a strong tradition of hands-on building as well as the usual talks you'd expect to see, and next week will be no exception to that as there's a hackathon on Friday night before the main conference on Saturday and Sunday. If you're at the event then make sure you sign up for your hackathon ticket, it's always a good experience.

Joind.in is one of the featured projects and I'm one of the maintainers, so I'll be at the hackathon and I'm hoping that we'll get quite a few things done during the evening. Joind.in is an ideal project for events like this since it's easy to get started with it, and we have a development platform virtual machine (that we'll have already downloaded onto USB sticks so no conference wifi delay) so you can be up and running in no time. We also have a specific label on our bug tracker for items that we think are manageable for people who don't already know the system, so chances are that if you want to, you'll be able to contribute to an open source project with something finished by the end of the night.

With a week to go, everyone attending PHPNW is starting to get excited. One of my highlights of the weekend is always the hackathon; as an open source project lead it's fantastic to meet new contributors and get a chance to hack in person with them and the more established people from the project.

This year will be no exception: PHPNW's Hackathon is on the Friday evening - you need a conference ticket, and you need to tick the "hackathon ticket" box. Joind.in will be there and we've got a very big todo list so if you are looking for something to hack on, then look no further!

The joind.in projects are set up so that the build process runs on pull requests when they are opened, which is great! It means that contributors don't have to wait for one of the maintainers to look at it, only to reject the contribution on something that could be picked up automatically. I've had a few questions about the setup so I thought I'd share how it works.

Recent additions to the joind.in API have introduced some new dependencies so we decided we'd start using Composer to manage these - but we don't want to run composer unsupervised. I'm sure this will bring the rain of "just run composer install, it's probably mostly almost safe" criticism, but actually it's quite tricky to run Composer without excluding vendor/ from source control so I thought I'd share how we did it so that anyone who wants to do so can learn from my experience!

It's that time of year again, the PHP North West conference is almost upon us, and this year they are once again running a hackathon. These events are a great way either to carve out some time to get your head down and hack on an idea that's been in the back of your mind for a while, but they're also a fabulous way to get involved in collaborating on projects. At PHPNW, you'll find there are quite a lot of open source projects at the hackathon, standing by to take on anyone interested in getting involved, either just for the evening or beyond. I'll be there, representing joind.in, a tool which is used by the conference itself. So what kinds of things will there be to do and how can you get involved?

I write a lot of APIs, and I also preach that your API isn't finished until it has excellent documentation. Which is great, but that means I therefore have to lead by example and document my APIs :) Enter iodocs from the talented folk at Mashery.

Iodocs is a node.js application (which is fun for a PHP developer. Most developers write a bit of JS, but this one hasn't). You describe your API and all its methods in JSON, and then iodocs presents an interface for you to enter API keys, add parameters to each request and press the "try it!" button. This makes your API call and shows you the results on screen, which seems like a great way to demonstrate what all the various parameters do!

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 php|architect magazine.

Often I find absolutely competent programmers, who aren't involved in open source, either because they don't know how to approach a project, or because they just aren't sure how the process even works. In this article we'll look at one example, the conference feedback site joind.in, and how you can use GitHub to start contributing code to this project. Since so many projects are hosted on github, this will help you get started with other projects, too.

I'm a regular speaker at a variety of (okay, mostly technical, so not really that varied!) events, and I submit talks to many CfPs (calls for papers). Whenever this happens, I tend to look back at whether I have any existing talks that I gave and liked and which would be a good fit. I use my joind.in speaker page for this: http://joind.in/user/view/110 as it's simpler than dredging through my directory of talks/articles on my hard drive (this is now rather large and unmanageable!).

I've recently been thinking that I should also do a better job of linking through to the various talks I'm giving/have given - and at around the same time I was contacted by the good folk at mojoLive about integrating against joind.in. To cut a long story short, the joind.in API now has the functionality for users to retrieve their list of talks!

I've been hearing great things about puppet, chef, vagrant, and friends for a while now, but since I work on my own I tend to either develop straight onto my ubuntu machine or grab an appropriate existing VM and use that. So I read about this brave new world of virtualisation but (as with most tools) they can be hard to introduce on your own, and I didn't.

Then I went to WhiskyWeb, which had a hackathon. I'm unclear on exactly what happened because my attention was elsewhere but it seems like @JayTaph showed off puppet and vagrant to @deizel*, who immediately built a vagrant setup for joind.in, which is an open source project that I'm currently leading. With the shiny new technology all packaged for me, I decided it was time to take a look!

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 …

disclaimer: I am not a client-side developer, and I don't write javascript. However I am committed to supplying useful APIs of all kinds, and JSONP falls into this category

Early in the development of the new Joind.In API, someone else started consuming the service to populate the javascript widgets they were making*. Since these scripts are intended to be used on many external pages, and they retrieve data from the joind.in API, cross-domain issues were a problem.

I'm a big fan of the google charts API - it draws much better-looking graphs than I would ever manage and all I have to do is assemble the right URL to make it work. I recently got a feature request to add QR codes to joind.in, so that speakers and event admins could easily allow people to link in to a particular talk page.

As of a few days ago, and following Chris' post, I am now the proud owner of an open source project.

When I wrote about launching a prototype of a new joind.in API, quite a few people started to try it out. My friend David Soria Parra emailed me to point out that many of the numbers in the API were being returned as strings. He said:

It's just a …

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at php|tek in Chicago. As usual there were a few great talks, a good crowd of new folk and a selection of established speakers all at the event and I had a great time. This year, there was one particular highlight that I wanted to share: the hackathon.

Following the principle of "release early, release often", I put live a very early version of the v2 API for joind.in today (so that I can use it in another project!). I haven't updated the documentation yet but in case anyone was thinking of consuming data from joind.in …

As a lead on an open source project, I spend a lot of time merging awesome contributions from our community into our main repo on github. Sadly, some of them are slightly less awesome (rarely but it does happen) and I sometimes need to unpick what happened to understand the …

Recently I mentioned the github API and retrieving issues from it. This is because the joind.in project agreed to move its issue tracking from github to JIRA, since the issue tracker on github is far from feature complete. I migrated only our open issues, and comments (and the comments ended up a bit weirdly formatted on the other end but this was the best they could do). It was nothing pretty or clever but in case it's useful to someone else, here's the script:

Recently I've been doing more git than I ever intended to, working with the Joind.in codebase, contributing and managing contributions to that. I quickly realised that I needed to make changes on branches, and since I'm new to git, it took a while to figure some of this out …

In case anyone thinks I've gone joind.in crazy after already writing about its import functionality this week, I really haven't. Its just that some months of pulling a few things together have finally bourne fruit and so I can actually write about them now they are done! The good …

Update! This post is now outdated - the import functionality on joind.in has been replaced with a CSV import.

As a conference organiser I work extensively with the site joind.in, which allows attendees to comment on sessions at a conference. Recently the site has also started supporting sessions with …

Recently I've been doing some bits and pieces with the open sourced event feedback site joind.in, including some work on its API to facilitate development of an iphone app. As a conference attendee, speaker and organiser, I use this site a lot for the various events that I am …

I'm adding some small features to the API for joind.in when I have a moment and this is my first experience of working with CodeIgniter. I've been getting increasingly impatient with its tendency to try to escape my SQL code for me - this is a really useful default feature …

Recently I've been contributing to the code project behind joind.in, the event information and feedback site. I rely on joind.in a lot and after putting up with a frankly astonishing volume of feature requests from me, its owner Chris Cornutt very politely suggested that I might like to …