Okay, so first presentation, I want to talk about finding an ASP developer community, which
is essentially you guys here.
You people here should say, I should not be gender-specific, so yeah, let's begin with
the lack of community.
So this is what I started talking about, well, this has been something that's been
in my mind for a long, long time.
So what's the problem?
ASP is an open source project.
There are thousands of developers, maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands of people
developing using ASP.
They are widely dispersed because it's open source and they're in different companies
in different places.
But even so, when you're working with a project, with a corpus of software, you need
a way to communicate about it, you need to ask questions, you need to share, you need to help.
ASP has been kind of an outlier in that it doesn't really have any kind of community behind
it.
Really, a place you can come together.
Why so?
Well, essentially, the issue is that the ASP developers, Google, and I guess Google themselves,
have never really seen the value of a community, so they've never done anything to promote
a community for ASP for the platform.
So it has always been a dispersed bunch of people working on this stuff.
Google is not going to change, so that's not the issue here.
The issue then is what do we do about it?
So what we're looking to do is to create an organic community from the developers themselves,
which is what we're trying to do with ASP devs.
What about community then?
What do I mean by this?
So having a community means sharing information about the software base we're working
with, to ask questions, to reply to questions, share information.
And when you have a community, everything works much more fluidly.
People can get their jobs done more easily, the whole thing just becomes much more pleasant.
Why is community a good idea?
So a lot of people kind of ignore this bit when it comes to open source.
A lot of people think that open source is just free software.
And it is free software.
You can download the code where you go.
But it works better if you consider open source to be a two-way street.
So not only do you download, you can also upstream stuff.
You can upstream patches, maybe, share experiences and forums.
Yeah, just make life easier.
I just want to say, particularly in corporate environments,
a corporate's often don't really get this.
They say, why should we spend money taking our code and pushing it upstream?
Isn't that a complete waste of time?
Well, it isn't.
So community and sharing is a win-win situation.
It's a win for the individual developer,
because it means you get some degree of recognition
and satisfaction from having some changes.
Hey, I upstream some changes the other day.
And if you do this more than several times over,
people will begin to realize that you have skills in a particular area.
So it's great for the individual.
Next, it's great for the team.
So project managers should encourage people to share stuff.
For one thing, it reduces the maintenance burden.
Once you have upstream something,
it becomes kind of part of the code base.
And there is less problems in merging that code in later on.
You don't have to merge that same bit of code in every single time.
There's a release.
So it reduces costs.
And then, looking at it from a wider perspective,
looking at the whole company, it's good for the company.
All companies should encourage their engineers
to participate and upstream stuff.
Why?
Well, if you do it enough, you get to a point
where you can actually influence the project.
So this is why, for example, Intel and Qualcomm
whoever were very closely with the Linux kernel developers.
Because by working with kernel developers,
they can get their changes merged.
They can get their ideas.
They can kind of influence the way Linux works.
And this is the same potentially with AUSP.
If you have a bunch of changes, merge them in,
people will then do things your way.
And you kind of get a little bit of control over that aspect of it.
Plus, you get the benefits of happier developers
and more efficient teams.
So community grid idea is a win-win on three different levels.
OK, so what about AUSP?
So September last year, I gave a talk at Linux Plummers,
called Search for an AUSP community.
And it was an interesting experience.
And really, pretty much directly after that, a bunch of us
who are in the room, and some of them are in this room as well,
kind of came together and said, well, what can we do?
Why don't we just make a community?
So we did.
So we created AUSP Devs.org, and we set up the basics of sharing.
So right now, most of what we do at AUSP Devs.org
is about the chat channel.
So we have a Discord server, the currently 300,
and something uses registered on that.
Typically, there's 40 or 50 people online at any one time.
We have created chat channels for specific areas of Android.
So we have Android TV, we have automotive.
We have a general channel for everything else.
There's a jobs channel for people who want jobs.
Kind of, and a few others as well.
So that is going really well, in my opinion.
Really, please, with that.
We also have some meetings, again, sharing.
So we have this meeting here, which is actually
a very first in-person meeting for ASP Devs.
We have ongoing online meetings.
So I've been running the AUSP and AUSMeta group
for three years almost now.
It's going quite nicely.
And late break and news, we have a newsletter.
So we have the first edition of the newsletter was published,
actually yesterday, as we were all driving to Fazden.
Well, next.
So basically, we aim to continue doing the same thing.
So continue continue continue to develop ASP Devs.org.
We aim to support existing and new open source projects.
And we'll talk about some of these as we go through
the rest of this presentations in this dev room.
And of course, we want to continue in-person meetings
and also online meetings.
I feel this is a way of creating a feeling of being part of a group.
So right now, the things I can point to is there will be another online
meet-up group, 19th of March, hope to see you all logged in there.
And we have opportunities for in-person meetings at both embedded
recipes and Leonardo Connect.
The only snack is, on the same days.
So you, well, it was a chance, basically.
So you can see a subset of us either in East or in Lisbon or whatever.
So yeah.
So in another show then, as we aim to do, we want to carry on making ASP Devs
better.
We'd like to start sponsoring some coding.
And we've got some ideas to do that as time goes on.
How can you help?
Well, join in.
So join ASP Devs, join the Discord server,
look at the chat, spread the word, tell people that you know in the
industry that we exist and that we would value your input.
And in about 15 minutes, we're going to have a little time to talk about this.
So Karim is going to lead us a session on how to improve ASP community.
And I hope you all get a chance to respond to that.
And this is it.
So thank you all very much.
I'm going to hand over straight away to the next presenter.
And then, like I say, Karim will do the panel session.
And we'll take it from there.