An open-source mic talk for AOL

2. Sorry!
That was honestly
the best slide you’re
going to see in this
talk.

3. Who am I?
• JavaScript & UI Developer, AOL.
• Write for ScriptJunkie, Smashing Magazine,
my blog and others on JS.
• JavaScript & jQuery Evangelist
• Also involved in the jQuery Project

4. Some Quick History
• jQuery is a JavaScript library that simplifies
DOM selection and manipulation
• Released in Jan 2006 by John Resig
• Project has grown to be used by over 50%
of the top 10,000 sites online.
• There are approximately 19 million known
sites using the library

5. Usage Statistics

6. What do we use jQuery for?
• Used across Aol for cross-browser DOM
manipulation, animation & effects.
• Occasionally combined with projects like
Backbone, JMVC, KnockoutJS etc.
• We use it in Agora,VIVAD and other
projects

7. What does the project offer?
• jQuery (core)
• jQueryUI
• jQuery Mobile
• Sizzle
• QUnit

8. Some interesting facts
• jQuery is now almost completely
community-driven.
• John Resig is still actively involved in
managing releases, project direction.
• Some businesses provide OSS hours to
staff just to work on projects like jQuery
(eg. Bocoup)

9. Organisation structure
• Executive board
• Voting members - primarily U.S based,
handle voting on donation fund usage
• Sub-teams - Developers that:
• Write patches for core
• Review bugs/triage and document
• Design, handle operations and more.

10. My involvement
• Core bug triage team
• API/Documentation team
• jQuery Learning site team
• Evangelism & Teaching

11. Bug Triage
• Evaluate jQuery core bugs based
on merit. Put together test cases
if needed
• Establish whether breakage is
due to a recent change and if so
what
• Cross-browser test to confirm
which browsers are effected
• Discuss issues with team
• If possible, suggest patches

12. Team achievements
• Churned through
10-15 tickets a day for
jQuery 1.4.3
• For 1.4.4 - 1.5.2 we
heavily worked to keep
this pace up
• It’s now rare that a
ticket isn’t reviewed
within 2 days of
submission (1.7)

13. Voting on features
• Done before work
is begun on a new
major version
• Community
interested in
HTML5 support,
modular builds &
more

14. Pros of getting involved
• Lets you give something ‘back’ to the
community
• Contributing encourages you to fill in gaps in
your knowledge
• Great way to learn and get to vote on
features before they land in a release
• Opportunity to learn how a large open-
source project works day to day

15. Challenges
• Time - how do you get involved around
work? isn’t it difficult?
• How to spread yourself across projects
• Time-zones - if they’re based in the U.S.
How do you make that work for you?

16. More Challenges
• Consistent availability - Do OSS projects
care?
• Paid work vs open-source work - do you
consider the opportunity enough?
• Level of skill - important to ensure you
know what you’re doing.

17. Conclusions
• There are 100s of really interesting OSS
projects out there
• You *don’t* need to have hours of free
time each week to get involved. Just
knowledge and an interest.
• Give it a try! It’s worth the experience and
the community loves all the help it can get.