Dysfunctional Programming

Bugs Ahoy is coasting along right now, and that’s fine. It fills a need, and apparently it does that pretty well from what I hear. However, there is a greater need – Mozilla needs a task board for all activities, and we need to not be distracted by reinventing yet another system. I’m kicking off a project to expand the Bugs Ahoy project to fill this need, and I am need lots of help.

Here’s the plan:

• The task board will scrape data from an empty github repository’s issues list
• These issues will be tagged in broad, useful ways (marketing, design, writing, mozilla hispano, whatever)
• New contributors with skills other than writing code will be able to browse the tasks available and get involved easier and quicker than ever before!

The main work that needs to be done falls into two categories:

• Authenticating with github (please help, my brain just falls apart when I try to read about OAuth)
• Creating a page that allows creating new tasks/modifying existing ones through the Github API

We want to avoid any need for users of the task board (both task creators and browsers) to ever visit Github; it’s just serving as a convenient backend to store the data. I’m snowed under with too many projects right now and can’t focus on this right now, but I would be thrilled to work with someone (or several someones!) to get it done. This is going to be a very useful tool when it’s finished, we just need some elbow grease to crank out a prototype. If you have experience with Javascript and/or Python, please get in touch! You can find the source on github.

Posted on December 12th, 2012 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: mozilla, projects