I have been working on finalising the programme for Kohacon10, and the good news is all except a couple of the presenters chosen have confirmed they will present.
Which means we have presenters confirmed from Nigeria, Taiwan, Pakistan, Malaysia, UK, France, USA, Australia and New Zealand. The conference will go up online in the next few days so be sure to check it out and register to come along.
Kahurangi decided he didn’t want to play football this week and decided to sit in Atarau’s push chair and eat his snacks.
It was pretty darn cold as you can tell from Atarau’s get up.
Throwing away a piece of cheese he has decided is too old to eat
Get in there you dirty rapscal
While sitting in the cafe at Te Papa to a random stranger
Hi, my name is Kahurangi James Lee Barr Cormack, want to watch me eat?
Over the years of working in software development I have come to realise that it is as important to look after your clients long term needs as it is their short term needs. It is something that is easily overlooked when you are in the throes of resolving issues that impact the client right here and now. But it is important that an equal amount of energy is spent on long term wellbeing as on getting the short term results.
In software engineering there is a concept called ‘Technical Debt’ it basically boils down to making choices that win you something in the short term, but you end up paying for in years to come. When working on a free software project this concept is still applicable, but an added dimension comes into play … lets call it ‘Social Debt’. There are often times you can make a decision that may afford you a short term gain, but may detrimentally impact the relationships with other members of the project. I posit that while Technical Debt is bad for the project as a whole, Social Debt usually hurts the debtor far more than the project. It is also far harder to recover from than Technical Debt.
Therefore I think it is in the best interests of any developers clients, that the developer takes care to not only make decisions that cause minimal Technical Debt, but also ones that cause minimal Social Debt.
In the course of looking through the PTFS public repository with an eye to integrating the code into koha, I thought it would be nice to pull out a list of the libraries who had sponsored the code.
Apologies to anyone I have missed, and corrections accepted.
So a big thanks to all these libraries.
PTFS have just made a lot of previously unreleased code available in their public repository
http://github.com/ptfs/Koha-PTFS
This includes the just released ‘Harley’ branch. It’s great to see the code seeing the light of day, and now the release management team will have the fun job of integrating it for 3.4.0. 🙂
Congratulations to the people at PTFS who worked hard to get this code written and released, and I’m sure there will be many an hour spent discussing how best to integrate it into mainstream now.
I have cloned the harley branch and pushed to both my home and work repositories.
UPDATE
Thanks to the awesome Galen Charlton (current Koha release manager) we now have a wiki page tracking integration of the code into mainstream.
http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/PTFSHarleyIntegration
UPDATE 2
Playing with the wordpress app on my new android phone. I don’t hate it yet.
Pat Eyler
Us old timers will remember Pat well, but the newer members of the community will not have had the opportunity to meet him. Pat was the first Koha Kaitiaki, and did a huge amount to promote Koha and to foster a strong community. Pat first became involved in Koha in April 2002, and became the 8th person to commit code to Koha. In May 2002 Pat was elected Kaitiaki, some of the neat things he did in that role were
There is little doubt in my mind, that without Pat Koha would not have made such inroads in the US. I know that Pat spent quite a bit of time talking with Stephen Hedges when Athens County Public libraries were first looking at Koha.
Pat thank you for all the work you put in. We think of you often
Kōrerorero 