App developer support community growth

Registered by David Planella

We want to start building a support community around application development topics and start promoting the resources we're going to use for that:

- The ubuntu-app-devel mailing list
- Askubuntu
- ...

Blueprint information

Status:
Complete
Approver:
Jono Bacon
Priority:
Medium
Drafter:
David Planella
Direction:
Approved
Assignee:
David Planella
Definition:
Approved
Series goal:
Accepted for precise
Implementation:
Implemented
Milestone target:
milestone icon ubuntu-12.04
Started by
David Planella
Completed by
David Planella

Related branches

Sprints

Whiteboard

Work items:
[dpm] Write an informative blog post on how to use the communication resources around app development: DONE
[dpm] Point to http://developer.ubuntu.com/community in the http://developer.ubuntu.com/resources/get-help/community/ page: DONE
[marcoceppi] Help developer.ubuntu.com show the latest (top?) questions from Ask Ubuntu (maybe home page, maybe community page): INPROGRESS
[marcoceppi] Merge application-development and paid-applications tags in Ask Ubuntu: DONE
[dpm] Fix bug #888532 to use the correct link to auto-fill the tag used for application-development: DONE
[dpitkin] Ensure all canonical employees working on app development to join the public channels and use them for all public communications: DONE
[dpm] Investigate the usage of a bot pilot for unanswered questions in the #ubuntu-app-devel IRC channel: POSTPONED
[dpm] Organize office hours a la patch pilot for the #ubuntu-app-devel IRC channel bot: POSTPONED
[dpm] Set up a Google Hangout/Q+A session on how to get involved in application development: TODO

Session notes:

Last few cycles has been converging software center, developer.ubuntu.com and myapps (allowing devs to submit apps to softwarecenter).
Create community around application development. Less about people writing about applications, more about people helping people write applications.
Guidelines for what tools to use -- Microsoft has one unified IDE (Visual Studio) with multiple components - what does Ubuntu have? What is recommended for developers getting started. IDLE, Eclipse, etc... established developers likely have their tool of choice. (Answer at http://developer.ubuntu.com/get-started/) Developer migrating from Microsoft tools - what should they move too?
  -- code snippets
  -- site like vbcity.com, http://devcity.net/
  -- common issues with getting apps published
  jml believes this is out-of-scope. Would be *great* to have a single SDK including an IDE, but a very huge project. Also, developer.ubuntu.com has a lot of this stuff already. agreed - jrgifford
We want to create an active, welcoming community, for both free and non-free applications.
Resources:
 - #ubuntu-app-devel && #ubuntu-arb on freenode
 - Ask Ubuntu
   - Getting lots of questions about developing on Ubuntu
 - Stack Overflow
   - Also getting questions about developing on Ubuntu. jml guesses that most of these are server-related
 - ubuntu-app-devel mailing list
 - Social (Twitter, Google+, &c)
Get help: http://developer.ubuntu.com/resources/get-help/community/
* ToyKeeper thinks we should improve linkage between developer.ubuntu.com topic pages and the support resources for that topic.
- Personas:
-- Ubuntu user
-- Professional app developer
-- Casual developer
Askubuntu API
-- Everything is read-only, but all you see on the site is accessible
Askubuntu can generate hot, FAQ, and traffic views of the application-development tag that we can syndicate on developer.u.c
- More activity on the channel:
    - Dedicated Q+As
    - Having regular content: e.g. tutorials
- Video sessions:
    - Let's pilot a Google+ Hangouts for app sessions. After all, we are just as cool as the Black Eyed Peas.

    - Tell a friend

(?)

Work Items

Dependency tree

* Blueprints in grey have been implemented.