In the last five months, I have been focused on changing the DNN community culture to become much more collaborative in how we build and manage the DNN Platform. Part of the challenge was to create an environment that fostered community participation and that promoted community involvement in platform development. A key part of this effort has been to focus on scaling the Pull Request process so that community members felt empowered to submit code fixes and enhancements to the platform. We have removed many of the barriers in our processes so that now most pull requests are processed within days or hours of being submitted.
During this time we have seen a steady increase in the number and size of community Pull Requests. Not only are we seeing more pull requests getting submitted, but we are also seeing contributions from a larger and larger group of community members. I enjoy seeing the number of contributors growing with each release and I look forward to adding your name to the list of DNN contributors.
Two weeks ago Engage Software decided to help kick things into high gear by holding a DNN Hackathon. Engage Software effectively shut down their company for an entire day and had everyone focused on enhancements for the DNN Platform. Regardless of skill set or their position in the company, everyone spent the day helping to improve the platform that we all know and love. Whether it was writing code, working on design or even doing QA testing, there were tasks for everyone. The hackathon kicked off around 9am on December 5th, and the final code check-in happened just after midnight. It was awesome to see code check-ins from Rich Campbell (President) and Henry Kenuam (CTO) which shows the level of commitment and support that Engage gave to the hackathon.
I wanted to publicly thank the employees and contractors at Engage Software who participated in the event. I especially wanted to thank Brian Dukes for organizing the event and Rich Campbell and his management team for their support and participation. In total 19 employees and contractors participated in the event. I encourage you to give them a shout-out on Twitter or in the forums and thank them for helping to make DNN better for all of us.
Hackathon Participants
Rich and his team deserve a lot of credit for setting a very high bar for contribution to the DNN Platform. I would love to see more companies and individuals show this level of support for the platform. I spoke with a few companies at DNNCon who expressed interest in doing something as a company to help improve DNN. I think that Engage Software has set a great example for those companies and others. Together we can make a difference and improve DNN for everyone.