The “Dirty Jobs, part 2” theme interested me. There’s some technical backlog on the ODK transition and infrastructure I would like to clean up. Some particular areas of interest:
- The docs contribution infrastructure. It was partially updated in March, but it still needs Windows support and easier commands to run and parse the output of the style and spell checkers. There is also this issue that is a big win for lowering the bar to contribute.
- The new website contribution infrastructure. The website should have style and spell checking to correspond to the docs. The reader’s experience should be consistent across these resources. At a minimum this would include porting the spell checker and the parts of the style checker that make sense. It might be a good idea to write a style guide and a contributors guide to the website as well.
- Implement a consistent code style across the Android apps. Using checkstyle, define a code style for ODK Android apps (with community input) and add it to each of the Android repos as a gradle task. Then bring each app into compliance with the new standard.
- Moving ODK 2’s testing over to Circle CI and unifying the project under the same technology. This is beneficial for community contribution and all the other reasons that ODK 1 chose Circle CI. ODK 2 should also be posting library dependencies to JCenter or another centralized repository, rather than the UW hosted Artifactory server.
This work’s cost would vary depending on the scope and how many of these tasks resonate with the community. I wouldn’t want to take more than half of the grant though, and would be happy to split the grant with another project in a joint proposal. I could also submit for just this amount if there is community interest around it.