[Koha-devel] Now: Programmer Training - Was: About Release process

[glaws]

I think a recruitment and training effort by the Koha community
targeting potential programmers should be considered; I do understand
the decentralized structure of the open-source community might make this
difficult. Below I suggest one potential candidate pool of Koha developers.

I have an educational background that includes programming, but my
general work history has been such that I have tended more towards
network administration and management, so that my coding skills are
rusty. If I had the time I probably could go back and figure out the
Koha structure and start doing some development, but I have so much
other stuff to do that there's no way this will happen.

However, at any given point in time I have 1-3 part-time tech assistants
working for me, typically college computer science students that are
passable programmers, and who actually do some programming here at work.
I usually have enough hours available for them that I could have them
working on Koha, maybe not designing new, novel features from scratch,
but certainly coding simpler tasks, bug swatting or signoffs. The
problem is the learning curve. These students work for me from 1-3 years
until they graduate, and while they may be perfectly capable of writing
a bubble up-and-down sort, a comprehensive understanding of a large
application is outside their experience base. Me sitting down and
working with them to do a dozen trial Koha installs and working with git
and going over the documentation and then coding something is just too
much of a time challenge and learning curve for all of us.

If it were possible, however, to have a training class, perhaps 15-40
hours, covering beginning Koha development, that might be a truly great
thing. They don't need perl training, they pick that up quite easily.
Same with databases--my last two assistants have been very good with
MySql, and one was a real whiz with phpmyadmin.
<alert-political/religious statement follows>But they don't immediately,
intuitively understand an ILS, a simple thing like a database and an
interface to the database that librarians have taken and cluttered up
with arcane terminology and convoluted "stuff" so that they could call
it an ILS and demand that only MLS degree holders get to have jobs and
the title of Librarian and get to touch the ILS. </alert> It is
frequently to my great amusement that I recall one of my military
assignments working in a large database center where the lowest ranking
individuals, several hundred of them I suppose, were the ones poking the
database (cataloging), and working on terminals connected to a Burroughs
mainframe database with no modern GUI.

Ideally it would be great to have this training I suggest in person, but
that implies attendance at a conference where there are instructors, and
that is a problem for the tech's part-time work hours, and Koha
conferences are infrequent and geographically problematic. On site
training would not be cost effective. Live video conference training
might be possible. I'm much less enthusiastic about online training than
the world at large, but reluctantly concede that may be the most
feasible option.

I'm well aware that vendors are sometimes stretched thin and that
training materials need frequent updating, so this would be a challenge.
On the client side money is always a consideration, but I probably have
enough in my budget that I could pay for a <em>modestly priced</em>
class for my techs. A potential side benefit for instructors/vendors is
that promising future employees could be identified.

Well, that's my input for the morning, now I need to go buy some plywood
and glue it to the wall and attach my three T1 lines to it so they don't
fall out of the ceiling and destroy the peace and harmony of the
Internet before we get our ethernet/fiber connection when we stand-up
our new Technology Center. See why managers don't have time for Koha
development? We have to build stuff.

Greg Lawson
Network Administrator
Rolling Hills Consolidated Library
1912 N. Belt Highway
St. Joseph, MO 64506


-------------------------------


On 07/12/2012 06:50 AM, Ian Walls wrote:
> -----------------snip----------------------
>
>   * *Limited personnel*:  There are only a few dozen people in the
>     world who really, really know the Koha codebase.  These folks are
>     the best suited to do testing and catch bugs, but they also tend
>     to be the ones doing the development, migrations and support for
>     libraries throughout the world.  It won't matter how clear and
>     clean our procedures are if there aren't enough people to process them
>
-------------------/snip--------------------------
>
>   * -- 
>



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