MediaShelf

A couple weeks ago, during Open Repositories 2012, Penn State announced that they had opened registration for this year’s HydraCamp.  The slots quickly filled, and 48 hours later the wait list was 8 people deep.  We are working to open up a couple more slots, so if you haven’t registered but hope to attend, visit [...]

People often ask me to recommend online learning materials for developers.  While I know of some good materials for learning Rails, I’ve never had strong recommendations for serious developers who want to improve at Frontend development – particularly JQuery, HTML5 and CSS3.  As of today, now you’ve got a good option.  If you’re interested in those [...]

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of commercial support services for Fedora. This has been a long time coming for the Fedora community, and I’m very excited that MediaShelf is now ready to provide this as a regular service offering. This support offering is staffed entirely by Fedora committers and we are setting aside [...]

The site is up for HydraCamp 2012, including a rundown of topics and the syllabus. Thanks to the generosity of our hosts at Penn State, the early-bird price will be only $375 – almost 60% savings vs. last year!   Registration will open by Thursday, July 5th.  We’ll notify the hydra-tech mailing list when you can sign up. [...]

Penn State will be hosting HydraCamp this year. Dates: October 8-12. 2012 Location: Atherton Hotel, State College, PA Registration will be open in late June. The curriculum will follow the same structure as last year Days 1 & 2: Rails/Agile Crash Course Day 1: Build a Rails3 Application with RSpec & Cucumber tests and track [...]

I hosted my first Office Hours for Hydra contributors today.  It was pretty fun.  A handful of people dialed in and we even added a long-desired feature to OM. Here’s a quick rundown of what we discussed.  The next Office Hours will be in the first week of January 2011. Blacklight 3.2 As of releasing [...]

Below is the outline of some conventions we’re adopting at MediaShelf as of active-fedora 3.0.0. This is largely a return to Rails conventions. Even within our own projects, these are just recommendations, but I figure there’s benefit in sharing the outline. In short, we treat the CatalogController as a SolrSearchesController and only use Blacklight helpers, [...]

We have a lot of distributed work going on across they Hydra community.  All of this work is coordinated with git using a Git branching workflow that requires you to do all development of new features in feature-specific branches.   Juggling git branches within a single project can be confusing enough, but doing it across [...]

This is the second installment in our series on the Hydra Community Principles. According to Al Gore, there’s an old African proverb “If you want to go fast, go alone.  If you want to go far, go together.”  This idea caught our attention early in the Hydra collaboration and has become the driving principle for [...]

This is the first installment in our series on the Hydra Community Principles. One Body, Many Heads references our project’s namesake, Hydra (greek Ὕδρα), the fearsome water beast with more heads than an ancient greek painter could fit on a vase.  Anyone who’s watched Percy Jackson and the Lighting Thief knows that it’s really hard to [...]