E&S WG request for input on requirements for Fedora Developer Portal

[Nick Coghlan]

On 21 July 2015 at 18:10, Petr Hracek <phracek at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi Taylor,
>
> On 07/20/2015 10:12 PM, Owen Taylor wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 2015-07-20 at 10:33 -0400, Jens Petersen wrote:
>>>
>>> In the last Env & Stacks meeting last week there was discussion about
>>> plans, direction, and content for the Fedora Developer Portal website
>>> that is under construction.  I think the plan is make the E&S WG more
>>> actively involved in overseeing the content on the Portal. Anyway as
>>> part
>>> of the discussion it was suggested by Langdon that it would be good
>>> to
>>> reach out to the WS WG for input on its requirements and suggestions
>>> for the Developer Portal since one of the main targets of Fedora WS
>>> is
>>> developers.  Since I am on both WGs I offered to liase on this topic.
>>>
>>> What kind of content, requirements or suggestions does the WS WG have
>>> for the Developer Portal?
>>
>> Hi Jens,
>>
>> I looked through the wiki page, and had a few questions/comments:
>>
>>   * Is the target was exclusively on using Fedora as a client machine,
>> or if it also is planned to cover using Mac/Windows to develop for
>> deployment?
>
> Yeah good point. Main target of Fedora Developer Portal is to allow users to
> use a features or projects who use Fedora.
> Window no. We have no plan currently to support it.
> If there is going to be a volunteer who creates a page for Mac it would be
> awesome
> But for Windows I think that it is not possible;)

Specifically for Linux container development, the combination of
Vagrant + VirtualBox + some of the tooling the Project Atomic folks
are putting together makes it feasible to have a cross-platform
development story. The Eclipse based tooling is also cross platform.

However, I don't think it makes sense to focus on that in the initial
iterations, although it may be a good thing to add later.

>>   * For someone coming to the website, they shouldn't feel that they
>> have to choose a language, a framework, a database, a deployment
>> technology before they get started. This is likely to stop anybody but
>> the most confident and experienced developer dead in their tracks. It's
>> fine if there is information on the site about a wide range of topics,
>> but we can't be afraid to make specific recommendations and orient the
>> experience of coming to the site around those recommendations.
>> (Probably a small set of recommendations rather than a single one,
>> depending on what language, if any, the developer knows, and what they
>> want to develop.)
>
> Thanks for this.
> More information can be found on our GitHub
> https://github.com/developer-portal/content
>
> We would like to allow users e.g to try Vagrant/Docker/DevAssistant
> and shows them how to install it and how to make their workstation suitable
> for using or even developing.

I think there are other recommendations we can draw on to say "If you
don't have a preference, use this". Think of a decision tree like the
one I suggested for deployment technologies, where we ask users
questions they're likely to know the answer to, and suggest a suitable
tech stack. We can also fall back on existing technology
recommendations in the other WGs and Fedora Infrastructure.

Probably another good one to defer, though - while I think we will
want such a guide for the new deployment tools folks are working on,
for this initial iteration of the site I think we're wanting to
attract folks that are *already* developing with open source
programming languages, and show them how to use their existing
toolsets effectively on the Fedora, rather than specifically aiming to
help complete beginners choose a suitable tech stack.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia