This is a repost of deborahSusan Clarkson's mail to the Summer of Code mentors list (reposted with permission, of course):

Having worked as a volunteer and with volunteers for the past 30 years, there is a myriad of reasons that motivate people to get involved. Most are motivated by a combination of factors.

Those motivated by passion, as Karoly mentioned, are willing to go above and beyond. Passion drives them to overcome their shortcomings, and they accomplish more than one might expect.

Reviewers. More precisely, the lack of them. People come to me months after a release and complain that they do not like how feature X is implemented. Others complain that patches in core queue just languish and they move to contrib instead where they can achieve something. This in itself is responsible for the quality of contrib -- they can achieve something because there commits happen without peer reviews. Here is a simple rule of thumb: if you spend a day creating a Drupal site, spend one hour on reviewing patches related to the functionality you just touched be it contrib or core.

We have a slimmed down version of SimpleTest 1.0.1beta2 in my repository ( https://4si.devguard.com/svn/public/simpletest readable by anonymous, get commit rights by contacting me ). The browser now supports uploads. Now every tests starts from a fresh default.profile Drupal install. There were serious cleanups. I expect simpletest to be submitted for core inclusion this weekend. Remaining tasks are more cleanup and more slimming down and updating the slimmed down code to RC1.

Today I read a post on Drupal Planet urging you to "place a friendly popup request for IE6 users to upgrade their browsers". Consider that Microsoft already pushed this upgrade, hard, and if someone is on IE6 still it very well can be that it's not her own decision but her IT people. There are bank applications that are broken with IE7. So, while it is true that we have every reason to hate IE6 pushing your visitors around might not be the best idea.

Someone said this in #drupal today. I long wanted to blog about this. I never use print_r. There is no need for it, var_export is far superior IMO -- if I need to write a quick script which actually does something on the data, I can copypaste the output into PHP code. Little but annoying things like escaping apostrophes are handled too, so it's even useful for dumping strings. Of course, var_dump is also useful as that dumps type info -- how cool it would be if it would do that in a PHP comment and then it would also render valid PHP code as debug output.

I will report approx weekly here. I have written a cURL, DOM and SimpleXML based browser instead of the sockets-based, PHP4-compatible Simpletest browser. This lets us inherit from unit_tester.php instead of web_tester.php, removing lots of code. I strive to finish it within a few days. Things you can help include making Simpletest to always start with a clean state, a new set of prefixed tables, see the issue for more.

These days, it's quite common that people with some PHP experience but without Drupal experience get on the Drupal bandwagon, often hired by some company or as a freelancer. If the next step is that you begin to work for some gig for a client then you and the client will both suffer. A very good and beneficial way to get acquainted with Drupal is core bugfixing. There are always bugs that are trivial to the experienced and can be solved by a newcomer if he puts himself to the task really.

If I have a database of something then why it is good for my business to share the whole database with everyone without compensation of any kind...? While the copyright law is flawed in many ways, still, a selective collection of facts ordered in a creative way is subject to copyright protection -- this surely indicates that there is something of value in there.

Now that the schedule is up, I am posting the inverse of my session attendance list so if you want to talk to me, you can see when I have free time for a BoF or something. Monday, 1:30-4:15PM, Tuesday 3:15PM-, Thursday 1:30-4PM and of course all the regular breaks.

NowPublic.com uses Sphinx for searching and it is really easy to use Sphinx for Drupal and then it's fast, extremely fast. There is no Sphinx search module because I could not find a module worth of code to release. You just need to set up Sphinx according to its documentation, of course the queries are Drupal specific, you just need to JOIN your tables together USING(vid) and don't forget to start the SELECT with nid: