Bug Juice / Snowpacolypse 2014

The middle of last week was spent snuggling in bed with my puppy dog, eating obscene amounts of junk food, and progressively getting lazier and...smellier (who wants to shower in the middle of snowpacolypse?!).  

I also watched this clip far too many times.  

I actually did do some productive work- I started following a Django tutorial for creating a basic blog engine.  Right now I'm stuck- having trouble syncing my databases (pretty positive it's a user-error).  

But I digressssss...onward to the meat of this post--> 

Django has a section called the "Ticket system" where you can report bugs or find tickets that you would like to take ownership of and "fix".  Django has a great section titled "Contributing to Django" where there is heaps of information on how to get involved.  After browsing through the "easy-pickings" tickets, our team realized that this was going to be anything BUT easy.

The most frustrating part was reading tickets that made NO SENSE.  We took turns reading the different tickets over and over again, out-loud,  putting stress on different parts of the sentence because the grammar was so horrible.  This further showed me the importance of effective written communication.  I mean, COME ON- at least give an example of what you're trying to convey and YES- grammar is essential- use it.

We quickly realized that we needed guidance.  Lynn reached out in the django-core-mentorship mailing list and we got a very informative response from Russ, a core-developer.  After emailing back and forth, our team decided to go with ticket #17638.

BAM.  OWNED.

This ticket involves documentation.  Here is the ticket description:

"There is one thing bothering me with Django documentation: it's split between topic guides and API reference. Often while googling I get to wrong one and it's not always easy to find another. There should be an easy way to do that: a link at the top/bottom/sidebar. And this way should probably be somehow automatic, so new pages are connected automatically."

So basically this ticket involves auditing the current links between topics and reference guides and adding any links that are missing- this is in the djangoproject.com code, NOT the django software code. 

This particular ticket was opened 2 years ago and has been "owned" by one community member in the past, but it looks like they gave it up for one reason or another.

In response to connecting the new pages automatically, a core-developer commented that this should be done manually and that making it automatic is "not likely to be worth the effort".  

It'll be interesting to see if our team can piece this together.  Even though this ticket is suppose to be "easy"- right now it feels like a daunting task, but nothing that us FOSSils can't handle *she says optimistically*