Samvera Developer Onboarding Working Group

Owned by Maria Whitaker
Last updated: May 17, 2024 by Juliet Hardesty
2 min read

Status

Meeting every other Wednesday at 4pm Eastern. Email heather@samvera.org for a calendar invite.

Meeting notes and agendas

Scope & Objectives

The Developer Onboarding Working Group will:

  • Create documentation and other resources designed to help Samvera development teams onboard a developer who has no Samvera experience.

  • Create plans to ensure this documentation can stay up-to-date via scheduled reviews and updates.

Multiple teams have gone through the challenges of onboarding developers. This working group will draw on those efforts to create a body of resources for this task. To that end, the group may work on some of the following, or come up with other ideas:

  • Collect information on strategies that help;

  • Create a curriculum to guide the learning process;

  • Create an inventory of resources that are currently available, such as the new Samvera Q&A sessions, the Developer Congresses, and mentor program; 

  • Update architecture diagrams;

  • Document important things to know about the code;

  • Collect links to external resources such as tutorials and blogs; 

  • potentially document tips from experienced developers.

To achieve these goals, this working group should include supervisors who have faced the challenge of developer onboarding as well as senior developers on whose shoulders this task has fallen in the past; new developers could also help significantly in the identification of pain points. And as always, the group will welcome anyone who thinks this work is important and is willing to help complete it. 

Deliverables & Timeframe

The deliverable will be online documentation and resources to facilitate onboarding a development team member, and maintenance plans for these resources. These will be discoverable from the Samvera wiki.

The group will begin work in March 2022, and scope the timeframe for this work.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XIMAUi7kQj7rmQIP3W5nFggFn5BfLh67TwYEPn5yKfw/edit?usp=sharing

Recommendations for connecting Samvera Github info/wiki to new Samvera KB:

  • Organize Samvera Github repo information under appropriate Samvera KB section (Hyrax, Hyku, Additional Samvera Components) 

  • Add to list of components (Github repositories) on that Samvera KB page 

  • If Github README contains installation information, use provided heading with repo name for link text (for example, “Getting Started with ActiveFedora”) and link to that heading in README 

  • If Github wiki exists and is good info to provide, also include a link to that using the Github wiki title provided with the repo name for link text (for example, “ActiveFedora Tutorials and Reference”) 

  • These practices keep from having repeated links that say the same thing (like just “Getting Started”) 

Meeting Times & Communication Channels

On the agenda of the first meeting, which will be scheduled following a doodle poll made available to interested community members, will be the decision about meeting frequency and meeting schedule. The group will use the existing Samvera communication channels such as mailing lists and slack channels.

Meeting notes and agendas

Members

  • @Heather Greer Klein , Facilitator (Samvera)

  • @bess (Princeton University)

  • @Juliet Hardesty (Indiana University)

  • @tamsin johnson (UCSB)

  • @Kait Sewell (Scientist.com)

  • @Kiah Stroud (Scientist.com)