Johan pointed out we're probably going to have a tie for 10th place, so we've added section (5) to address this. If you've already voted, please re-vote on this. If you haven't yet voted, please vote against this updated version rather than the original.
B.
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Developer Education Book Campaign 2013
Proposal:
1. Purchase and distribute a programming book to the top 10 Inkscape contributors for the past 12 months, as calculated by Ohloh.net: http://www.ohloh.net/p/inkscape/contributors?query=&sort=commits_12_mo
2. The contributors can choose from one of the following books: i) Effective C++, 3rd Ed. by Scott Meyers ii) Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler iii) A Tour of C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup
3. The campaign proposer (Johan Engelen, or their designee) will be empowered to officially announce and introduce the campaign to the larger community.
4. The board chairperson (or their designee) will be empowered to i) Identify the qualified contributors as per (1), ii) Contact the qualified book recipients to collect their address and choice of book from (2), iii) Purchase and disseminiate the books to the provided addresses, iv) Collect reimbursement from SFC for expenses incurred.
5. If a recipient does not respond within a week, or chooses to pass on receiving a book, the next person in the list will receive it. In the case of a tie that would necessitate extra books be purchased, up to 12 total books maximum can be provided, in order to solve the tie.
[ ] a. Yes, conduct this campaign as defined above [ ] b. No, we should not conduct this campaign [ ] c. Maybe, but I disagree with some definition of the campaign
Background:
Lately, I've become obsessed with code quality. I've been reading Bjourne Stroustrup's "bible" on C++11, watched all videos of the "Going Native" conferences, started using clang, ..., and it has made me much more aware of the language's facilities for preventing bugs. I regularly browse over Inkscape's code and try to fix things I think can be improved (janitorial); our source is a pretty big mess I really do think Inkscape can use some love to improve logic and to decrease some amount of spaghetti.
I just saw the book "Effective C++", which I believe is a great resource to inspire thought and learn how to write better code, and is meant for experienced programmers. In general: how do you guys feel about donating something [like this book] to our top committers for their "education"? We would need some metric of what "top committers" means, we could use ohloh.net's numbers.
*For example*, we have 10 people that committed more than 50 times in the past 12 months. So that'd be 10 books = 10 x 31 euro = 310 euro cost --- shipping and whatnot --> 400 euro cost.
(After we release 0.91, I will become very active in pushing for C++11 (i.e., upgrading our compiler dependencies to more modern versions so we can start using part of C++11 features), and general maintenance / refactoring / cleaning up. It's pretty rewarding I find, and very low-key in terms of long-time brain-investment.)
Johan